GeForce GTX260+ vs Radeon 4850 Part 1: Performance
Direct3D (Current)
The first set of benchmarks will cover newer Direct3D titles that are still currently benchmarked in most review circles. Because the titles can be quite demanding, I’ll stick to 1600×1200 for most of them; also many of them will not be benchmarked with 8xMSAA as they’d be too slow. Additionally, Stalker will be benchmarked with 0xAA as it’s not possible to force driver AA in the game on ATi’s cards like it is on nVidia’s.
The 260+ immediately delivers a hefty 42.38% performance gain overall in the tested situations. It smashes the 4850 in Stalker with 0xAA and in Bioshock with 8xMSAA, probably partly due to the 4850 running out of video memory. Interestingly the cards are almost tied in Crysis at 0xAA but the 260+ is over 50% faster in said game when 4xAA is applied, again likely in part because the 4850 is running out of VRAM.
