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It is easy to lose sight of the
Radeon 4850 in the hustle and bustle of the graphic card industry. It is now an older card, and is outperformed by many other available products. Numerous new
Radeons provide better performance, and everything in
Nvidia's 200 series outperforms it as well.
But that is missing the point. While the Radeon 4850 is outperformed by numerous products, this does not reflect poorly on the Radeon 4850's ability to play modern games. The pace of video card advancement is, with very few exceptions, rapidly out-pacing the ability of games to take advantage of the graphical power available. This means that while the Radeon 4850 is not as powerful as many other products on the market, it is still powerful enough to drive most games at moderate resolutions. It is extremely unlikely that anyone playing at a resolution of 1680x1050 or less needs anything more powerful than a Radeon 4850. This card can even play Crysis at high frame-rates as long as the graphical details are set to medium.
And then there is the value proposition. The least expensive Radeon 4850s cost only a hair more than $100 bucks. That's right - for the price of two new games, you can have a graphics card that can play almost anything currently available at high detail settings. Even a year ago the existence of such a card would have been considered a miracle. And so there you have it; the Radeon 4850 is a miracle, and well worth any gamer's consideration.
