Here is our current test system.

Our test OS was Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 with Nvidia's 175.12 of Forceware drivers and ATI Catalyst 8.6. All the latest software revisions were used in our testing.

And we're off. The first thing we notice is that we do seem to be limited by our Phenom setup in the CPU hungry Crysis but also how amazing the 4850 is as a performer besting the 3870 by 7fps and meeting the 9800 GTX head on. Quite an achievement for the company written off by many not long ago.

Unreal Tournament 3 is the most popular graphics engine in use today and something we thus must test. Here we see two 4850s come out on top far and away besting two 9800 GTX SLI cards in every resolution and by 18fps at 2560x1600. The 4850 does it's best to keep up but comes in slightly under the GeForce 9800 GTX.

uake Wars is one of the last Open GL games on the market and may not have much of a life longer as an API for games but for now it's something we'll be testing. OpenGL has always favored Nvidia it does so here but ATI have made huge gains in the ability of their cards with the 4000 series.

Valve's Half-Life 2 proves to be much friendlier to the 4850 series and we again see some great performance from ATI.

Here the 4850 again comes in under a GeForce 9800 GTX but easily clobbers the previous ATI generation.