Synthetic tests

3DMark Vantage's color fill test is typically limited by memory bandwidth, but the Radeon HD 4850 still manages to push more pixels per second than the GeForce 9800 GTX, which has over 70GB/s of peak memory bandwidth to the Radeon's 59GB/s.

Moving to RightMark's fill rate test, which uses 8-bit integer texture formats, the Radeon falls behind the 9800 GTX when thrown multiple textures.

Vantage's texture fill rate test uses FP16 textures, and in it, the 4850 really shines. Not only does the card push significantly more texels per second than the 9800 GTX, it just edges out Nvidia's new flagship GeForce GTX 280.

The 4850's filtering performance scales predictably here. Sure, the Radeon may trail the 9800 GTX with each filtering type, but its filtering performance is vastly improved over the Radeon HD 3870.

Through all but one of 3DMark's synthetic shader tests, the Radeon HD 4850 fares extremely well. Only the GPU cloth test seems to give the 4850 trouble, and even then, it's still significantly faster than the other Radeons. Otherwise, the Radeon HD 4850 is faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX, particularly in the parallax occlusion mapping and Perlin noise tests. In the latter, the Radeon even outguns the GeForce GTX 260.