Introduction

Given the level of excitement the HD 4850 left, not only with us, but also gamers and enthusiasts all over the world, the HD 4870 quickly became extremely anticipated by people. Will it beat the GTX 260? - How much faster than the HD 4850 is it? - Can it out-perform the GTX 280? - How does Crossfire scale?

These are all questions that we want answered, and today we intend to have answers for all of them. On paper the HD 4870 looks to be the right card for a lot of people. On the internet, looking at early prices it also seems to be the right one. Ultimately though, what it's going to come down to is performance.

While the HD 4870 may come in significantly cheaper than the GTX 280, it can't perform significantly lower; it's aloud to be a little lower, but ultimately if AMD intend to get any form of speed crown it has to perform extremely well in a Crossfire environment. Crossfire is going to constantly have the upper hand over SLI thanks to the huge amount of Intel based chipsets out there and all of the people jumping on the CF bandwagon. It's not only an easier setup, but a much cheaper one too.

We've got Sapphire cards again on hand; we say cards because we have two! - If one HD 4870 is exciting, then two is some word that I don't think exists yet. Before we get into the benchmarks, we will have a look to see what Sapphire has done with the HD 4870 package and have a look at the core specifications in a bit of detail.