Although there are currently many ATi Radeon HD 4890’s currently in the hands of techie journalists around the world, the majority of said journalists have signed non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with AMD prohibiting them from sharing any information regarding the new graphics card until a certain date.
Apparently the team at Gamestar.de managed to get hold of one the review cards without signing an NDA, and have gone ahead and published a full review of the HD 4890. The downside is that the review is in German, making it difficult to dissect all the important details.
However, the language of benchmarking is a simple and universal one, and based on Gamestar’s findings, the HD 4890 is shaping up very nicely indeed.
The test machine consists of an Intel Quad QX6850 (3.0GHz) and 4 Gigabytes of DDR 2 800 RAM.
What is especially interesting about the review, is that Gamestar was able to overclock the GPU to 1000MHz and perform a number of benchmarks. With the GPU running at this speed the HD 4890 competes very well with Nvidia’s more expensive GTX 285.
Overclocked, the card manages to outperform the GTX 285 at all but one resolution (1680×1050 with no AA, which it ties) in the Crysis DX 10 GPU benchmark. The margins are negligible, but are significant considering the HD 4890’s lower price point. At its regular clock speeds, the HD 4890 manages to perform very closely to the GTX 285, losing narrowly at most resolutions.
FarCry 2 is a slightly different story, with the GTX 285 narrowly outperforming the over clocked HD 4890 at most resolutions. The overclocked HD 4890 goes on to beat the GTX 285 at most resolutions in Call of Duty 4, and trades blows at different resolutions in Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.
Even at its default clock speeds, the HD 4890 nips very closely at the GTX 285’s heels most of the time, and that is when it isn’t outperforming Nvidia’s pricier option.
Bear in mind that these are the first published benchmark scores for the HD 4890, which is only being officially announced today.
It will be interesting to see how Nvidia’s forthcoming GTX 275 performs against ATi’s new high-end single GPU card. Reviews of Nvidia’s GTX 275 should start going live today, and should give a good idea of how the two cards match up.
Currently at 70 Euros (R900) cheaper than the GTX 285, the HD 4890 is looking in very good shape.
ATi HD 4890 Official Specifications
Compute Power: 1.36 TerraFlops
Core Clock Speed: 850 MHz (100 MHz more than HD 4870)
Memory Type: GDDR 5 (Same as HD 4870)
Memory Clock Speed: 975 MHz (75 MHz more than HD 4870)
Frame Buffer 1GB
Max Board Power: 190 W ( 30 W more than HD 4870)
Idle Board Power 60 W (30 W less than HD 4870)
Memory Bandwidth: 124.8 GB/s (14.8 GB/s more than HD 4870)
Process: 55nm (Same as HD 4870)
Transistors: 956M (Same as HD 4870)
Stream Processors: 800 (Same as HD 4870)
Texture Units: 40 (Same as HD 4870)
ROPs: 16 (Same as HD 4870)
Memory Data Rate: 3.9 Gbps ( 0.3GB/s more than HD 4870)
Memory Bus: 256-bit (Same as HD 4870)
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