In our HD 4850 review we saw a slight performance deficit for the 1,024 MiByte version in situations where the amount of video memory wasn't the limiting factor. When we asked AMD about it, we were told that this could be caused by the outdated VGA-BIOS. Nevertheless a HD 4850 with 1 GiByte VRAM can beat a 512 MiByte version if you play at 1,680 x 1,050 with 8x FSAA. But are the results the same with the bigger HD 4870? Is it worth the additional 30+ Euros?

Radeon HD 4870 with 1 GiByte VRAM
Since the reference design is the same for both cards, the 512 MiByte and the 1,024 MiByte version look just the same. The only difference is that for the 1,024 MiByte version eight GDDR5 with 128 MiByte each are used. The recommended clock speeds are still 750/1.800 MHz (chip/VRAM).

Most producers overclock their 1 GiByte cards by about 5 percent and some use individual cooling solutions: Both the Powercolor HD 4870 1024 MiByte PCS+ as well as the Gainward HD 4870/1.024 Golden Sample come with their own, controllable cooler. Of course the 512 MiByte and the 1,024 MiByte versions were running at the same clock speeds.