GeForce GTX260+ vs Radeon 4850 Part 1: Performance
GTX260+ Advantages
- Great performance in modern games at a very reasonable cost for a high-end part.
- Excellent dual-slot cooler with great thermals, especially when idle.
- Best anisotropic filtering in consumer space.
- 896 MB memory for taxing games.
- Flexible and open driver profile system allows the user to force their preferred settings into games.
- A wide range of AA modes including full screen super-sampling modes.
GTX260+ Disadvantages
- Extremely poor performance with 8xMSAA in some situations.
- Extremely poor performance with transparency super-sampling AA in some situations.
- More driver issues than ATi, especially with legacy games.
Conclusion
Overall the GTX260+ is a great high-end part for a very reasonable price, and according to online benchmarks it’s almost as fast as the GTX280. It has a great cooler, great thermals, excellent image quality in games, and a wide range of anti-aliasing modes.
However its drivers could use more work and in some cases it has very low performance relative to what its specs would indicate, especially relative to ATi’s cards like the much weaker 4850.
