GTX285 vs GTX260+ vs 4850 Performance Test

Direct3D (0xAA & 2xAA)

The first set of benchmarks covers the most demanding games I own, and thus all of them are run at either 2xAA or 0xAA to keep performance up. Also most of them use a middling resolution of 1600×1200.

We’re off to a good start with the 285 offering an average performance gain of 22.59% over the 260+ in these demanding titles, and it would be higher were it not for Far Cry 2 bringing it down. In particular there’s a large 32.30% performance gain in Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl when using 2xAA, which is exactly the setting I use when playing the game. Note that ATi hasn’t implemented driver AA in the Stalker titles, so the 4850 fails those tests.

Stalker Clear Sky is the most demanding title I have and even when using substantially reduced DX9 details, the 4850 simply collapses under the strain, even with no AA. It’s also worth mentioning that in both Stalker titles, the 285 is around twice the speed of the 4850. This gives you an idea of how crushing the X-Ray engine is on GPUs, even at a middling resolution of 1600×1200. On a related note, I can confirm the camouflage netting is missing on the 4850 when using the game’s full dynamic lighting (DX9) path, a problem that was reported when the 4770 launched.

All other titles also receive solid performance gains over the 260+ except for Far Cry 2, which unfortunately appears to be CPU limited with my particular test. In the future I plan to use a different benchmark for this title.