GeForce GTX260+ vs Radeon 4850 Part 1: Performance
Introduction
After my 8800 Ultra died, my original plan was to pick up a 4850 as an interim card and wait for the 55 nm GT200 core, rumored to be coming since about August of this year. So I picked up a 4850 and then waited…and waited…and I’m still waiting.
Now we’re almost half-way through November and the 55 nm refresh is still nowhere in sight; current release speculation ranges from Q4-08 to Q1-09. With demanding new games I want to play like Far Cry 2, Stalker Clear Sky and Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway, I needed more gaming muscle. So I caved and picked up a GTX260+ (216 core edition).
This time I was better prepared for a GPU comparison so I have a lot of interesting benchmarks to show you in part one of this article, while part two will contain an image quality analysis. My benchmarks also include “real” settings and contain settings I use on the card to demonstrate the value of the upgrade to me in terms of actual gaming. After all, I’m a gamer as well as a hardware reviewer and I buy video cards to play games, like most of you do.
To make it easier to read the text charts, an orange highlight means the Radeon wins while a green highlight means the GeForce wins.
Hardware
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 (reference 3 GHz clock).
- Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R (Intel G33 chipset, F7 BIOS).
- 4 GB DDR2-800 RAM (4×1 GB, dual-channel).
- nVidia GeForce GTX260+ (896 MB, nVidia reference clocks).
- ATi Radeon 4850 (512 MB, reference clocks).
- X-Fi XtremeMusic.
Software
- ATi Catalyst 8.10, highest quality mip-mapping set in the driver.
- nVidia Forceware 178.24, high quality driver setting, all optimizations off, LOD clamp enabled.
- Windows XP 32 bit SP3.
- DirectX November 2008.
- All games patched to their latest versions.
Settings
- 16xAF forced in the driver, vsync forced off in the driver.
- AA forced either through the driver or enabled in-game, whichever both cards could manage.
- All results show an average framerate.
- Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
- Since I’m on XP, all DX10 titles were run under DX9 render paths.
