Despite this botched launch, where the Radeon HD 4850 was available even before the press had information about it and the 4870 is still not available, there’s no denying that the 4850 is a very good card. Its performance is only 19% below the GeForce 260 GTX’ and is overall on a par with the GeForce 9800 GTX +, while beating out the 3870 X2! Note that those figures are influenced by the slight factory overclocking of the Asus model tested for this article, but on the other hand they’re adversely affected by the absence of
Race Driver: GRID due to the problems we had with our sample card.