ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4850 vs vs Vivante GC1000+ Dual-Core

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4850

The ATI Mobilty Radeon HD 4850 from AMD is a DirectX 10.1 upper middle-class notebook graphics adapter. Technically, the GPU is based on the desktop HD 4850 GPU but with a lower clock rate for reduced energy consumption.

The gaming performance of the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4850 should be comparable to the desktop HD 4830 and is therefore very good at resolutions below 1080p. The high amount of shaders and the wide 256 bit bus can allow the card to run practically every DirectX 9 game in high resolutions and details. Demanding DirectX 10 games, such as Crysis, can be played with medium to high detail settings. Compared to an Nvidia GeForce GTX 260M, the HD 4850 should be a bit faster on average.

The newer Mobility HD 5850 is noticeably faster than the Mobility HD 4850 if GDDR5 graphics memory is present. If DDR3 with a smaller 128 Bit memory bus is used instead, then this would bottlebeck the 5850 to performance levels closer to that of the Mobility HD 4850.

The mobile HD 4850 core is based on the RV770 chip and features 800 stream processors (or 160 5-dimensional shader cores). These cores do the graphics work previously done by dedicated shader and pixel pipelines of older GPUs. The stream processors (also called ALUs) are grouped in five-way VLIW units. Each of the five instructions of a VLIW bundle has to be independent from the others, so the overall performance is highly dependent on driver optimizations.

The Mobility Radeon HD 4850 includes UVD 2, Avivo HD software and an onboard soundchip for 7.1 sound output over HDMI or DisplayPort. UVD 2 supports full bitstream decoding of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1 streams by the GPU, thus reducing workload from the CPU. In addition to this, the software also supports dual video stream decoding and Picture-in Picture mode for full compliancy to the UVD BD-Live standards. Simply put, the Avivo HD technology is able to handle most video tasks and enables the GPU to decode HD videos.

AMD has claimed a current consumption of about 45-65 Watt for the cards part of the mobile HD 4850 to HD 4870 range. Still, it is unclear if this value represents the core chip alone or the entire MXM board with memory modules. We estimate that the VRAM chips would contribute about 5 Watts total to the overall energy demands of the mobile HD 4850.

Compared to the desktop ATI Radeon HD 4850, the mobile 4850 features a slower core clock and is therefore more similar to the desktop HD 4830 in terms of overall performance.

Vivante GC1000+ Dual-Core

The Vivante GC1000+ Dual-Core is an integrated graphics card for ARM based SoCs. It supports Android, Windows Mobile 6, Windows CE and Linux and the standards OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL 2.1, OpenVG 1.1, and DirectX 11 (9_3). The chip is can be clocked with up to 600 MHz (28nm LP) or 800 MHz (28nm HPM). The theoretical calculating power of the GPU is 50 Mio triangles / s, 650 Mio pixels / s and 12 GFLOPS (according to cnx-software.com). According to Vivante however the GC1000 is capable of 345 to 460 Mio triangles /s and 11 to 15 GFLOPS.