ASUS W90Vp: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870... with CrossFire
by Jarred Walton on May 29, 2009 5:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
HD Gaming Comparison
We'll start out with a comparison of performance at 1920x1080 in order to focus squarely on the intended use of these notebooks. We will have performance results at 1680x1050 later, as well as detailed results on the next page. The easiest way to look at things is to look at the relative performance in terms of percentages. We have several charts that break things down, starting with the comparison of NVIDIA's 8800M GTX SLI and ATI's Mobility Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire.
If we look at average performance, this is actually a very close match up. We suspect that with a faster dual-core processor, the ATI solution would take the lead as we are CPU limited in many of these titles. However, there are definitely games where NVIDIA excels and other titles where ATI holds a clear lead. The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena, FEAR 2: Project Origin, and Mirror's Edge all clearly favor NVIDIA -- and that's not even taking PhysX support in Mirror's Edge into account. On the other hand, Call of Duty: World at War, Empire: Total War, STALKER: Clear Sky, and to a lesser extent Race Driver: GRID and Crysis (at medium detail) all favor the ATI solution. It's worth noting that this is the best-case scenario for ATI, since we are using the optimal driver configuration with the beta ATI driver. Let's see what the beta driver does for performance relative to the original driver.
Obviously, the newer titles stand to benefit most from the updated driver. Despite not being as recent as some of the other titles are, Mirror's Edge sees the biggest performance boost, indicating CrossFire support is now present in the beta driver. Empire: Total War illustrates another important point. We capped the "percent improvement" at 300%, but the reality is that the game was unplayable with the earlier driver. CrossFire mode -- which can't be disabled on the ASUS W90Vp -- causes severe rendering errors, so that most of the objects in the game are not visible. The newer driver fixes the situation, but we are left to wonder how many other games might suffer from similar incompatibilities. A couple games also see small performance drops (Fallout 3 and Mass Effect), and STALKER: Clear Sky performance is cut nearly in half. Many of the remaining titles show improvements on the order of 10% to 20%.
Before we continue, we must again point out that NVIDIA is severely handicapped in this comparison since we are using the bleeding edge, brand-new ATI Mobility Radeon 4870 CrossFire and comparing it to GeForce 8800M GTX SLI, which is over a year old. The 9800M GTX has 112 SPs, potentially improving performance by 17%, while the GTX 260M and 280M increase the gap even more. The GTX 280M has 128 SPs running at 585/1463MHz core/shader, compared to 96 SPs at 500/1250MHz. Core and performance are therefore up to 56% higher, with almost 19% more memory bandwidth. We will be providing our best apples-to-apples comparison between the Mobility 4870 CrossFire and GTX 280M SLI in the near future. ATI currently trades blows with the 8800M GTX, depending on the title, but the driver situation still greatly concerns us. Let's investigate a little more to show why.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
25 Comments
View All Comments
tynopik - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
the charts are a COMPLETE DISASTERthe first few, I'm still not sure what they're trying to say
the FRAPS charts are better, but:
1: thousandth's of a frame per second? talk about unnecessary precision
2. NO CONSISTENCY. different tests were run for each game, it's bizarre
we have:
- W90Vp OCed / W90Vp 1080p OCed / W90Vp (new drivers? who knows?)
- OCed New Driver / OCed Init Driver / Initial Driver
- OCed New w/o CCC / OCed New Driver / OCed Init Driver / Initial Driver
3. The HD (1920x1080) benchmarks suddenly switch over to 1680x1050 with Mass Effect
- even though you have 2 charts for 1680x1050 results (one on the 1080p page and one on Standard gaming page), the results don't match (for instance on the 1080p page it says the Q6600 had 51.674 fps in Mass Effect while on the standard page it says 53.375)
I can tell it took a lot of time to run all these benchmarks on all these different platforms, but you have to FINISH!
JarredWalton - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
The 1080p Mass Effect listed as 1680x1050 is merely a typo. I'll correct the labeling of the initial charts - I didn't subtract the 100%, but it makes for an easier chart since there aren't negative values. The earlier poster is correct that it's a ratio, so 100% means equal performance.JarredWalton - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
FWIW, I initially "finished" at 5:30AM. I have now edited the graphs, added a bit more commentary, and inserted a page analyzing the overclocking results of the W90Vp. Enjoy!strikeback03 - Monday, June 1, 2009 - link
One more - last page first paragraph under the photo, I'm guessing you said "ear splitting" but Dragon has 'your spreading" there for the description of the volume levels.Jackattak - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
LOL poor Jarred... ;) Get some rest, mate!Thanks for the article. Was nice to see benches on a system like this. Why anyone would lug around a 17er I have no clue, though. I think the 15.4" form factor is the perfect balance of size/weight/performance.
I just wish more manufacturers offered higher-end GPUs or at least gave more options for end user installable discrete GPUs (would love to slap a 8800M GT 512 in my XPS1530).
The0ne - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
I have a loaded vostro 17" with wuxga and it's very nice. However, lugging it around with me on oversea business trips can become tiresome. This thing is almost 12lbs O.o I can't imagine having this at all even if I wanted the specs.Most people don't realize those extra small lbs will drag you down sooner than you ever can realize :)
The0ne - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Oh, and this comming from a guy that's actually in shape and built lolGolgatha - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
"ATI's Mobile Driver Program -- or Lack Thereof"Seriously, if they want to sell a multi-thousand dollar laptop, they better have drivers available the same day as the desktop GPUs. I can't imagine anyone buying a gaming laptop with anything but nVidia GPUs inside it.
BTW, I have 4870 1GB cards in Crossfire on my desktop, so this isn't a post to just bash ATI. However, they do need to get with their industry partners and correct this issue fast.
Zoomer - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Don't know what the fuss is about, I recall installing up to date ATi drivers on my 9600 mobility and possibly even the Rage 3D (can't really that well, unfortunately).*Requires mobility modder or inf editing.
JarredWalton - Saturday, May 30, 2009 - link
The ATI Catalyst drivers on their website "install" without apparent issue, but they don't actually update the drivers - just the CCC. In the past, ATI may have provided drivers that would work with all of their chipsets, but that's not the case with modern GPUs as far as I can tell. Certainly, it's a problem with HD 4870 CrossFire.