GeForce GTX260+ vs Radeon 4850 Part 1: Performance

OpenGL

“OpenGL is dead!”

I laugh when I read this statement. In addition to several high-profile OpenGL titles on their way (Rage, Wolfenstein 2 and Doom 4), there are a large number of legacy OpenGL games I enjoy replaying regularly, so OpenGL support is very important to me. It’s also a good way to benchmark video cards as OpenGL games are hardly ever tested in regular review circles these days.

This next set of benchmarks look at a collection of legacy OpenGL titles that, despite their age, are reasonably demanding on video cards and deliver reasonably good visuals too.

Yet again we see surprising results. With 4xAA the 260+ “only” posts an average performance advantage of 22.22% while with 8xAA it posts an overall loss of 2.88% . Every 8xAA result (with the possible of exception of Quake Wars) is either very close or is a loss and again, whatever is happening here is not caused by the 260+ having a lack of memory bandwidth and/or capacity.

The issue of the mysterious 8xMSAA performance will also be covered in part two of this article but again, early screenshot tests confirm the 4850 is applying 8xAA when requested.