Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 Video Card Review

The benchmarking portion of this review will consist of one synthetic benchmark and four real world games. The synthetic benchmark will be none other than 3D Mark Vantage and is designed to give us an idea as to the DirectX ability of the 4670.

The real world benchmarks will be based on the following four games UT3, Crysis Warhead, Call of Duty 4, and Mirror's Edge. These games are popular among the PC crowd so that is why they are picked and do a pretty good job at pushing the video system. All of these games will be tested at their highest playability for the 4670 video card.

Not only will they be run through benchmarks, but they will also be played to insure a real world game experience.  

3DMark Vantage shows the power and abilities of any DX 10 video card. That is the reason for using it in our reviews to give a measurement of that power. The setting that was used for the benchmark was all on default of the Performance setting in 3DMark Vantage.

The numbers show the power of the Radeon HD 4850 having 800 Stream Processors over the Radeon HD 4670 with 320 Stream Processors. These numbers look very bad for the Sapphire HD Radeon 4670, then again it is hard to play a benchmark. 

The Real World benchmarks will tell the true test of what the 4670 can do. 

UT3 is a very popular LAN Party game that has great post graphic effects. The testing was done with a resolution of 1920 x 1200 with all settings at 5 to max out the game effects. The map DM-CarbonFire was loaded up with bots. Then the game was tested to make sure it was playable before the benchmark was run.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 played UT3 at max speed with an average of 51 FPS. The Radeon HD 4850 pulled a higher average frame rate, but the extra power is not needed in order to have a great gaming experience in UT3.

The Sapphire 4670 can pull great frame rates at this resolution so going higher end is only going to get you a higher average.

Crysis Warhead is the latest of the Crysis series of games and Warhead is one of the most demanding First Person Shooter games to date. So with that being said 1920 x 1200 resolution was not an option. So 1680 x 1050 resolution was used at the Mainstream settings

The game was played to make sure it was usable.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 held a very stable frame rate of 33. The great part about Crysis Warhead is that with the blur effect turned on the lower frame rates are not as noticeable. The Radeon HD 4850 showed that it has more processing power over the Radeon HD 4670. Still the 4670 held it pretty well, and did make for a good gaming experience for the budget minded in Crysis Warhead.

Call of Duty 4 is one incredible single player game, and an even bigger online game. COD4 is based on a DX9 graphic engine that just pushes the DX9 abilities. We ran COD4 at 1920 x 1200 resolution with all settings maxed out except for Anti-Aliasing. The Anti-Aliasing setting was set to 2x for that was the playable limit for the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670, anything beyond this was too choppy to play.

In the heat of an all out fire fight the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 held a strong average 37FPS. The frame rate stayed up pretty well, and showed that the Radeon HD 4850 has more power. Yet, all that extra power was not really needed to make a great gaming experience for any budget minded gamer. The only higher potential the Radeon HD 4850 provided was 4x Anti-Aliasing.

Mirrors Edge is a very new game to the PC market. It holds a very different game play of fast moving acrobatic movements on top and inside buildings. Mirrors Edge was benchmarked and played at 1920 x 1200 resolution with all setting turned up to high. The PhysX part of the game was turned off in order to get a good steady frame rate while moving through areas that use PhysX heavily.

Mirrors Edge is the newest game in these benchmarks. It also goes to show that even newer games are not going to hold the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 back. The 4670 kept the game play pretty smooth through out the testing and gaming. The Radeon HD 4850 once again shows that it is willing to beat the 4670 hands down.

Once again the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 is for a gamer on a small budget and is going to love using it to play this game.