The Performance Story

Enough of this banter—Let’s get to the benchmarks

Does ATI’s new GPU deliver 75 percent of a GeForce GTX 280’s power for a fraction of the price? We went into the Lab to find out. The short answer is yes. The Radeon 4870 runs nearly as fast as a GTX 280 in most benchmarks for about 60 percent of the cost. That’s pretty impressive. Running two 4870 boards together in CrossFire delivers performance that beats a single GTX 280 board for the same cash outlay. This might tempt you to pony up for a pair, but think before you leap.

Dual-card solutions are well and good in practice, but before you make the jump to two cards, you need to be aware of the pitfalls. First, adding a second card to your rig completely obviates the power and noise benefits the 4870 has over the GTX 280. Second, functionality that you may take for granted, such as multiple-monitor support, might not work with a dual-card solution. ATI only recently added dual-monitor support via its 8.2 Catalyst driver and Nvidia’s SLI still does not support it. Third, new games frequently require a driver update or even a patch before they’ll properly take advantage of a second card. Multiple cards are great for power users, but you need to be aware of the sacrifices involved, preferably before you whip out your credit card.

During the course of our testing, we discovered that many of these new cards were CPU-bound on our test beds in all but the most demanding games. This means adding a second (or a faster) videocard to your system shows very little performance improvement because the CPU can’t handle its tasks fast enough to keep the GPUs occupied. We’ll be updating our test bed before the next round of GPU reviews to mitigate this factor. But if your current CPU is slower than an Intel Core2 Duo X6800—a 2.93GHz dual-core Conroe—you probably won’t see much benefit in games other than Crysis if you upgrade to more than one graphics card, whether it’s a GTX 280, a Radeon 4870, or even a Radeon 4850.

But we digress. The short, short verdict is that ATI’s new Radeon 4850 and Radeon 4870 deliver stunning performance at an extremely compelling price. If you’ve been waiting to upgrade to a DirectX 10-compatible graphics card, now is the time. For less than the price of an Xbox 360, you can upgrade your GPU and get kick-ass gaming performance on most modern PCs.

Visiontek Radeon HD 4850

A fairly competent DirectX 10 GPU for less than $200

We’ve spent a ton of time talking about the efficiency and overall pixel-pushing prowess of ATI’s new GPU, so we won’t waste much ink on it here. Suffice it to say that the 4850 delivers enough power to drive your sweet, new 22-inch monitor at its native resolution.

The card’s silicon is equivalent to that of previous-gen high-end cards. It’s equipped with 512MB of GDDR3 memory running at 993MHz. 

Click here for the rest of the review, benchmarks, and our verdict!

EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked

A midrange G200-based card that Nvidia can hang its hat on

When Nvidia unveiled its G200 GPU, we were immediately drawn to the shiny, speedy GeForce GTX 280. Why wouldn’t we be? With high core and memory clocks and 240 stream processors to churn through the toughest shaders, it was sexy and fast. We were less excited about the 260, which sported 192 stream processors and slower clocks speeds but cost about $100 less than the 280 (at the time). Since then, ATI has released its R700-based Radeon 4870, which outperforms the original 260 but costs the same amount.

And that’s where the Core 216 edition of the 260 GTX comes in. With the same stock clock speeds but 24 more shader processors than the original, the new version of the 260 GTX delivers comparable performance to the 4870 at a similar price. The speeds and feeds are about the same as the original 260, although EVGA clocked this card’s core at 626MHz (up from 576MHz stock) and includes 896MB of GDDR3 running on a 448-bit bus at 1053MHz (stock is 999MHz).

Click here for the rest of this review, benchmarks, and our verdict!

Visiontek Radeon 4870 HD

Once a benchmark slayer, these boards have been eclipsed by Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 260 Core 216

It’s tough to be a videocard. With just a quick spin of a piece of silicon, you can go from state-of-the-art to obsolete. That’s nearly what happened to the Radeon 4870 HD when the first revision to the GeForce GTX 260 shipped. By upping the number of shader processors from 192 to 216, Nvidia managed to push the 4870 out of the highly contested $350 price category.

That’s not to say that the 4870 HD isn’t a fast card; in most of our benchmarks, the margin of victory for Nvidia’s new part are slim, at best. With 512MB of quad-pumped GDDR5 memory running at 900MHz, the ATI card has a memory bandwidth advantage over the GTX 260, which shows in high anti-aliasing/anisotropic filtering situations, but not anywhere else. The card’s core utilizes ATI’s now-mature 55nm process, with the entire core (including the card’s 800 shader processors) running at 750MHz.

Like other current-gen ATI cards, the R700-based 4870 supports hardware decoding of common video formats, including MPEG-2, H.264, and VC-1. The card can even decode two video streams simultaneously, which minimizes CPU utilization and frame drops when you use the picture-in-picture feature common to many Blu-ray discs.

From a pure performance perspective, the 4870 delivers sufficient power to run most DirectX 9 games at resolutions up to 1920x1200. Even DirectX 10 games, such as Crysis, are playable at typical resolutions without anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. We’re reasonably certain that the GTX 260 outperforms the 4870 in Crysis with AA and aniso turned on simply because the board lacks sufficient memory to store everything that the game demands at those settings. With more shader processors, the ATI card should have the edge in a shader-heavy game like Crysis, which could turn the advantage back to the 4870 when it’s installed on a board with a 1GB frame buffer.

For now though, we’d rather spend a few more bucks and get one of the new GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 boards than a 4870 HD. 

Verdict: 8

BFG GeForce GTX 280 OC 1GB

The GeForce GTX 280 is hot stuff! 

Sporting almost the same configuration as Nvidia’s reference design, BFG’s GeForce GTX 280 delivers amazing performance with the second-generation DirectX 10 chipset from Nvidia. It soundly spanks ATI’s new 4870, as well as all but the dual-GPU graphics solutions from the previous generation—and even against those, the GTX 280 wins all but a few benchmarks.

The real question we’re asking is, Do we need this much power? Luckily for Nvidia, the answer is yes. The company’s GT200 GPU, which forms the heart of the GeForce GTX 280 and 260 boards, is a great performer, despite its massive footprint and huge energy requirements. BFG overclocked the GPU core ever so slightly—it runs at 615MHz—while the GDDR3 memory ticks along at a stock 1107MHz. The GTX 280 features 240 stream processors running at 1350MHz—a touch more than double the GPU’s core speed.

Click here for the rest of the review, benchmarks, and our verdict!

Sapphire Radeon 4870 X2

The fastest videocard we’ve ever tested—for the most part 

We’ve long considered videocards that sport two GPUs second-class citizens. They have all the problems of multi-card solutions—namely application incompatibilities and no multi-monitor support—but fail to perform as well as dual-card solutions, since multi-GPU cards usually use slower midrange GPUs.

That’s finally changed with the new RV770-powered Radeon 4870 X2, which mounts two of ATI’s fastest GPUs on a single card, without sacrificing power-user features like multi-mon support.

Click here for the rest of the review, benchmarks, and our verdict! 

Nvidia GeForce GTX 295

We’ve made no secret of the fact that we love the pulse-pounding speed that ATI’s Radeon 4870 X2 boards deliver, but there’s a new speed king in town—the GeForce GTX 295. On paper, the two GPUs on the 295 fall somewhere between the GTX 260 and GTX 280, but this board delivers a crushing performance blow to ATI’s fastest part

The GTX 295’s GPUs feature 896MB of GDDR3 memory and the full complement of 240 shader cores previously seen only on GTX 280 boards (current GTX 260 boards have just 216 shader units). However, the core and memory clocks are a touch below those of the single-GPU GTX 280 boards—576MHz and 999MHz respectively. Additionally, the new GPU is Nvidia’s first to step down from a 65nm to a more efficient 55nm process. The benefit? Mega-speed in one double-wide card. Even with the process-size shrink, the card requires a new mid-mounted cooler—that’s right, the heatsink/fan is sandwiched between two boards, each with its own GPU and memory.

Click here for the rest of the review, benchmarks, and our verdict!