GeForce GTX260+ vs Radeon 4850 Part 1: Performance
Thermals and Cooling
With the benchmarks out of the way, it’s time to discuss the experience of using the card itself. To put it simply, I’m very impressed with the 260’s thermals and cooler. The dual-slot cooler exhausts all of the heat out of the case, unlike past nVidia designs that had side grills which allowed hot air to leak back into the case. The new shroud is solid plastic all along its side and it funnels all of the heat out the case, so ambient case temperatures are not impacted nearly as much as in the past.
As of this writing, the card is currently idling at 52 C which is not only less than my 8800 Ultra (about 55 C-58 C), but it’s vastly less than my 4850 which idled at 79 C. Under heavy loads the fan spins up sometimes but it generally has a more pleasant sound than the slightly “whiny” 4850 fan. Subjectively it also doesn’t sound as loud as my 8800 Ultra did under load.
As a negative, I have found the card’s circuitry is a bit louder (high frequency “transistor” noise) than other video cards I’ve used, especially when the framerate is very high, such as when navigating in-game menus.
Drivers
nVidia’s drivers offer an automatic profile system with an open and flexible way to configure games, and that means you’re more likely to be able to configure things to your liking. Using this method I have a range of games that I can reliably force AA on my 260+ while no AA is possible on the 4850, at least not without resorting to dodgy application renaming which can break other things.
Unfortunately for nVidia, ATi’s drivers still remain superior in terms of gaming compatibility and robustness. Long-standing issues on nVidia’s DX10 hardware still exist (e.g. Red Faction being broken since November 2006 while it works perfectly on the 4850). We also still aren’t getting a regular WHQL driver release cycle from nVidia, unlike ATi who have been pumping out monthly WHQL drivers since 2002.
Anisotropic Filtering
nVidia’s DX10 GPUs have noticeably better anisotropic filtering quality than ATi’s DX10 GPUs, and I’ll cover it a bit more in part two of this article. It’s very hard to capture the difference with screenshots, but in actual movement you’ll find shimmering/crawling/wiggling dramatically reduced or even eliminated on nVidia’s hardware. Most people probably won’t notice a difference, but after gaming with nVidia DX10 cards for so long, I can spot it immediately.
