Sapphire Radeon HD4830 Evaluation

In the third installment of our Budget Gamers’ GPU series we have another little gem from Sapphire. This is the HD4830 512MB (DDR3), this card boast almost the same specs as the HD4850 but with a sub $100 price tag. Will this card have the power to find a home in an enthusiasts system?
Read on to find out.

Product: Sapphire Radeon HD4830 512MB DDR3
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: November 20th 2008
Product cost: Under $100 at most etailers
Manufacturer: Sapphire Technologies
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff

 

{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accessories}
Packaging and Accessories:
The Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 ships in the same style box we have come to expect from Sapphire. Granted this time we have the official ATi “Ruby” on the front, but otherwise the packaging is the same.
Inside we find the same array of goodies (DVI-D to HDMI) RCA to S-Video etc.

{mospagebreak title=Features and Specifications}
Features and Specifications:
Sapphire’s HD 4830 is the first in the lower-end 4xxx series cards to need additional power. This would seem to hint at greater GPU performance if nothing else. The Cooler on the card is a double height cooler but the tang is only single slot. In fact the 4830 is pretty much a 4850 with a few less shaders.

The official specifications for the Sapphire HD4830 are listed below (take from ATi’s website)
956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
256-bit GDDR3 memory interface
Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
Shader Model 4.1
32-bit floating point texture filtering
Indexed cube map arrays
Independent blend modes per render target
Pixel coverage sample masking
Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
Gather4 texture fetching
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
640 stream processing units
Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
128-bit floating point precision for all operations
Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
Shader instruction and constant caches
Up to 160 texture fetches per clock cycle
Up to 128 textures per pixel
Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
Early Z test and Fast Z Clear
Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
Up to 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing
Accelerated physics processing
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
High performance vertex cache
Programmable tessellation unit
Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
Anti-aliasing features
Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
Gamma correct
Super AA (ATI CrossFireX™ configurations only)
All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
Texture filtering features
2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
OpenGL 2.1 support
ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform¹
Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for H.264/AVC, VC-1, and MPEG-2 video formats
High definition (HD) playback of Blu-ray and HD DVD video²
Dual stream (HD+SD) playback support
DirectX Video Acceleration 1.0 & 2.0 support
Support for BD-Live certified applications
Hardware DivX and MPEG-1 video decode acceleration
ATI Avivo Video Post Processor¹
Color space conversion
Chroma subsampling format conversion
Horizontal and vertical scaling
Gamma correction
Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
Detail enhancement
Color vibrance and flesh tone correction
Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
Bad edit correction
Enhanced DVD upscaling (SD to HD)
Automatic dynamic contrast adjustment
Two independent display controllers
Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
Full 30-bit display processing
Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
Fast, glitch-free mode switching
Hardware cursor
Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920×1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560×1600 (dual-link DVI)³
Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content⁴
Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048×1536
DisplayPort output support
24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560×1600³
HDMI output support
All display resolutions up to 1920×1080³
Integrated HD audio controller with support for stereo and multi-channel (up to 7.1) audio formats, including AC-3, AAC, DTS⁵, enabling a plug-and-play audio solution over HDMI
Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
Underscan and overscan compensation
Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
VGA mode support on all display outputs
ATI PowerPlay™ Technology⁶
Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
Performance-on-Demand
Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
Clock and memory speed throttling
Voltage switching
Dynamic clock gating
Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology⁷
Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two, three, or four GPUs
Integrated compositing engine
High performance dual channel bridge interconnect⁸

{mospagebreak title=Performance}
Performance:
Now I know all of the specs, accessories and features are what you want to read about but I thought I would go ahead and bore you with the usual performance testing just so you know what you will be getting when you drops your cash on this card.

Test system:
Intel QX9770
Asus P5E64 WS Evolution
Sapphire HD 4830 512MB GDDR3
Asus EAH3850 Smart OC (used for base line comparison)
2GB (2x1GB) Kingston DDR 1600 6-6-6-18
Western Digital RaptorX 150GB HDD
Plextor PATA BluRay Drive
CoolerMaster 850Watt PSU (RS-850-EMBA)
Microsoft Windows Vista x64 Ultimate
Cyerlink PowerDVD 8 Ultimate (BluRay Playback)
Catalyst 8.11 drivers used for all testing.

BluRay and HD Playback:
I should just go ahead and tell you that ATi has always had the upper hand in GPU to TV out. Ever since they introduced Avivo they have just had this part locked down. The 4830 features two HDCP encoders each with its own on-chip key storage. There is also a built in AMD Xilleon HDTV encoder and a full 7.1 HD Audio encoder for the HDMI out on the card. When you add these up you get quite a nice picture.
All of the BluRay movies and HD TV that I ran through it were perfect.

3DMark Vantage:
Of course I would not be able to keep this test out of a GPU review so here are the scores for both the HD3850 and the HD4830:

HD3850 1GB DDR2	HD4830 512MB DDR3

Gaming:
For gaming I ran Six recent games (both DX9 and DX10) and compared these to the performance of the HD4650.(being the next in line mid-range GPU). Each game was run through three times and the scores averaged. In cases where I was able to get higher resolutions for game play I have screen shots of the different resolutions for each. Where both GPUs used the same settings I used only one screen shot.
Image quality shots are included for each game. All scores are in Frames Per Second, Higher scores are better.

The Games:
Assassin’s Creed (DX10)
When I ran the HD 4650 tests I found that I had a playable game even though I was under the 30 FPS mark. With the 4830 I saw a whole new ball game Frame rates jumped from the high 20’s on the 4650 and 3850 to over 40. My test run was the first level from the beginning of the Templar attack through to your faked death.

HD3850 1GB DDR2	HD4830 512MB DDR3

	Minimum	Maximum	Average
EAH3850 SmartOC	21	42	28.202
Sapphire HD4830	30	56	41.256

Bioshock:
The HD 4830 makes short work of Bioshock despite the DX10 surfaces. The HD4830 easily outperforms the older HD3850. For testing I ran through the “Welcome to Rapture” level until you enter Medical Pavillion.

HD3850 1GB DDR2	Easy AdSense by Unreal HD4830 512MB DDR3

	Minimum	Maximum	Average
EAH3850 SmartOC	27	86	47.103
Sapphire HD4830	47	136	79.296

Crysis Warhead:
I was not expecting much out of the D4830 while playing Crysis Warhead. This is not due to lack of confidence in the GPU but more due to the way Crysis Warhead renders and its affect on most GPUs.
For testing I ran the “Call Me Ishmael” level until after you take out the road block.

HD3850 1GB DDR2	HD4830 512MB DDR3

	Minimum	Maximum	Average
EAH3850 SmartOC	11	51	35.397
Sapphire HD4830	21	64	40.909

To my surprise I was able to get better resolution out of the 4830 that I was with the 3850. I had fluid full motion game play at 1680×1050 while the HD3850 and 4650 could only manage 1280×1024.

Portal:
Portal was another easy win for the 4830 I imagine that I could get 4x AA out of it and still maintain very playable frame rates. My Portal testing took me through the first six test chambers.

HD3850 1GB DDR2	HD4830 512MB DDR3

	Minimum	Maximum	Average
EAH3850 SmartOC	0	50	34.431
Sapphire HD4830	0	148	107.7

Call of Duty, Modern Warfare:
Call of Duty 4 is pretty scalable and while you can run some fairly high resolutions on it you start to dog down as you add in the eye candy. For testing I ran the “Crew Expendable” from your insertion onto the cargo ship until you open the container with the manifest.

HD3850 1GB DDR2	HD4830 512MB DDR3

	Minimum	Maximum	Average
EAH3850 SmartOC	31	64	45.558
Sapphire HD4830	46	106	70.655

The 4830 was able to handle the full 1920×1200 gaming experience and give me fluid play at 70 FPS.

Spore:
Spore is simply a fun game, due to its “sandbox” style game play you really will get a different game every time you play.  For testing I ran through the whole Cell Stage trying to keep to the same evolutionary choices in each run. The HD 4830 was able to handle Spore at high resolutions without any problems.

HD3850 1GB DDR2	HD4830 512MB DDR3

	Minimum	Maximum	Average
EAH3850 SmartOC	20	32	27.777
Sapphire HD4830	19	33	30.737

{mospagebreak title=Value}
Value:
The HD4830 has recently had a price drop, this means that you can now find this card for under $100 US Dollars. Now there is really nothing else in this price range that has this performance and if you add in a 2^nd one you are still under $200 and have some serious power under your hood. This makes the HD4830 one of the best values out right now.

{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
The Sapphire HD4830 is an amazing card for its low price. I was very pleasantly surprised at its performance. I was able to run most games maxed out without any performance issues at all and was even able to play Crysis Warhead at an acceptable resolution and settings. The sub-$100 price tag means you can get all of this power without breaking the bank and you can even run multiple GPUs and still be under the prices of the next level up in GPUs.
If you are looking for a good buy in the mainstream gamer price range but want to push for enthusiast performance you would not be wrong to pick up one of two Sapphire HD4830s for your system or as a gift from that gamer you know.

For its great value and performance The Sapphire HD4830 receives our Best on the Planet Award.

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