Mini Comparison – ATI Radeon HD 3450 to HD 4870
I’ve got a budget Radeon HD 3450 (256mb) and a higher end HD 4870 (1gb). I did a little test in 3DS Max (2009, 32bit) in Direct3D mode to see how they fared.
Test Setup – Intel quad core 4GB ram, vista 64
Latest Catalyst drivers
Scene: 7 “bitmap” textures (in 7 different Mental Ray A&D materials), 1 MR A&D Glass (thin) preset material, and one MR A&D mat with a tiny AVI texture (animated flow arrows). (wanted to test filling of video memory too).
Scene had 1.55 Million Polygons, according to the built-in statistics. I had a steam locomotive stock model with rails and tracks and spikes as geometry, cloned (not instanced) 4 times, plus a bunch of planes (which held my bitmap materials, including UVW Map modifiers), plus a cylinder with UVW Map which held the animated flow arrows texture. Display Transparncy was set to simple/basic whatever it’s called (I’m writing on my Mac now… Max machine is shut off).
Orbiting around was ok – the 3450 kicked in the Adaptive degradation pretty quick, which I then turned off. According to the statistics, the 3450 gave me ~3.6 FPS, and the 4870 gave me ~7fps. This was playing with one maximized viewport (the way I work). Pressing the play button to play back the animated arrows didn’t change the fps on either setup.
Also using D3D caching, linear/linear and 1024/512 bitmap load sizes. Not using anti-aliasing.
So, as for this test, the 4870 is roughly twice as fast as the 3450 – whether it’s due to the larger VRAM (256 ddr2 vs 1024 ddr5), or the actual hardware, I don’t know. But it is better.
Conclusion – go for the 4870 if you’re after ultimate performance. If you’re not doing heavy duty modeling/texturing, then the 3450 is probably more than enough. I was quite impressed with it, considering I only paid $40 for it.
