Benchmarks

Windows Vista Performance and Comments (Service Pack 1)

As expected, Windows Vista performance with the ATI 4870 is excellent as it is not only a new graphics card, it is also supporting the latest DirectX 10 technology. General usage on Windows Vista is excellent, I had multiple windows open and was dragging them all over the place with no slow down and considering this wasn't really a real life test or anything any sane user will be doing during their spare time, its a good indication for the rest of the OS. Colours were clear and with a clarity you expect from ATI. Video playback was also excellent, with good colour representation and smooth playback. Overall the ATI software has improved a lot since our last ATI based review and is it far more stable than it has ever been which is a good thing right now.

Call of Duty 4

Graphics Card	1280x1024	1600x1200	1920x1200
Palit 4870 Sonic Edition 512MB (Sonic Mode)	84	69	63
Palit 4870 Sonic Edition 512MB	78	65	58
ATI 4850 512MB	75	62	55

Call of Duty 4 has been out for nearly a year now on the PC and it still shows off some excellent graphics and some high resolution play. As you can see from the benchmark above, the Sonic mode adds on quite a few additional frames per second to the game, but even then all three cards do well in this test as the game is well optimised.

Crysis

Graphics Card	1280x1024	1600x1200	1920x1200
Palit 4870 Sonic Edition 512MB (Sonic Mode)	51	47	42
Palit 4870 Sonic Edition 512MB	50	45	40
ATI 4850 512MB	47	42	37

Crysis hasn't lost any of its shine since last year, if anything it has gotten better with the latest batch of graphics cards on release at the moment that finally make it playable at the high end settings. This will be the last time we use Crysis in our reviews as the follow up - Crysis Warhead is just a few days away from release. The benchmarks above show the Sonic mode once again coming out on top with an additional 1 or 2 frames per second, while this may not sound alot - for a game like Crysis it can make all the difference in some of the more heated moments in the game.

Devil May Cry 4 - DirectX 10

Graphics Card	1280x1024	1600x1200	1920x1200
Palit 4870 Sonic Edition 512MB (Sonic Mode)	95	81	72
Palit 4870 Sonic Edition 512MB	92	77	69
ATI 4850 512MB	87	73	67

Devil May Cry 4 may not be a popular title on the PC but it does have some excellent graphics to show off in the game, especially in higher resolutions in DirectX 10 mode. Devil May Cry 4 is also one of the best optimized DirectX 10 games around as you can see from the benchmarks above it does well across all the range of ATI cards which is great credit to Capcom's conversion team. Overall the Sonic Mode comes out on top adding around 4 frames per second to each test, but the plain vanilla Palit card isn't far behind either.

3D Mark Vantage at 1280x1024x32 - 3D Mark Overall Score

GPU	Mark
Palit 4870 Sonic Edition 512MB (Sonic Mode)	8743
Palit 4870 Sonic Edition 512MB	8270
ATI 4850 512MB	7450

While I don't think much of 3D Mark as a benchmarking tool, nearly every site that reviews graphics cards seems to included it. As you can see the ATI cards  do extremely well in the tests with the Palit card in Sonic Mode out at the top of the tree with a mark over 400 more than the same card running in Vanilla mode without the Sonic switched on.

Widescreen Gaming

On another note I just wanted to add that as a gamer who prefers to play games on a Widescreen monitor or TV the Palit 4870 Sonic Dual Edition works fantastically well at 1680x1050 in nearly every game I have played during the tests. There are a number of games we haven't benchmarked that we have run with the Palit 4870 and they are Space Siege, World in Conflict, The Witcher and many more, not one of these games had any problem running with their full detail settings at 1680x1050 so most gamers will get excellent value out of this card.