The Big GPU Shootout: Part I, Upgrade Now or Wait?

Conclusion

“The Feel” of the videocards:

Here is gets very subjective.  The Nvidia control panel seems to be stuck in a time warp while ATi’s has appeared to progress.  “Centered timings” could not be enabled easily in the Nvidia CP, and a convoluted workaround was necessary.  Both sets of drivers are very mature.  This reviewer gives a slight edge to Nvidia’s IQ over ATi’s although you have to be really nit-picky to notice.  The cards themselves can easily be ranked in terms of performance, 1-5 – top-to-bottom:

1. 4870×2

2. 280GTX

3. HD4870

4. 8800-GTX

5. 2900xt

The 4870×2 is very smooth and minimizes any microstutter that is usually apparent in multi-GPU solutions.  It is ideal for 19×12 resolution in this reviewer’s opinion.  If you must have a single-GPU solution, the GTX280 stands a notch above the HD4870.  Even where the frame rates were very close, the Nvidia GPU felt more “solid” and would be a good choice for 19×12.  4870/512MB just falls short and would be excellent for 16×10.  In the next parts of our review, we will compare with the 1GB versions of HD4870 and explore possible 512MB VRAM limitations.  As to upgrading, a definite “yes” for 2900xt/8800GTS class at any resolution we tested – if you like details and good framerates; that would include 3800 series from AMD and also 9800GT series generally.  A single HD4870 provides a nice and solid performance boost over this midrange class of yesterday’s card.  For 8800GTX/9800GTX, a gamer might still hang on and put off upgrading, but a 280GTX would make a very solid upgrade now. Either the 280 or 4870×2 would make tangible improvements in performance in all the games we tested.

In conclusion, we can see that the older midrange cards are getting too old to play the latest DX10 games at 19×12 with full details and with anti-ailasing applied.  Even the top card of the last generation, 8800-GTX is getting bogged down by the latest games.  We also see that they are getting strained at 16×10.  A HD4870 appears perfect for this resolution and perhaps 280GTX gives a little extra which may be enough for 19×12 resolution.  However, for “no compromise” – in most situations, HD4870x2 handles 1920×1200 with ease.  We also find that although Catalyst 8-8 works fine for HD4870x2 scaling, Crossfire X-3 is buggy and many times refused to run.
Well, we will be back very soon with Part II of our testing and and let you know you know if Catalyst 8-9 [and 8-10] make any difference with Crossfire.  And we will also watch Nvidia’s drivers evolve over the same period to see if they managed to get more performance out of their Tesla architecture.  Best of all, we will overclock our e8600 to near 4 Ghz and see what happens with gaming performance over the current stock 3.33Ghz with our top performing videocards.  We will also add several new game benchmarks and be able to compare 4870/512MB with 4870/1GB and Crossfire X3 combinations with 4870×2 to see if the 512MB it is now forced to share with a 4870/512MB limits performance over “true” crossfire X3 with 4870×2 and 4870/1GB in the second slot.
In Part III we will further demonstrate performance increases by upgrading to x48 Motherboard and full crossfire 16x + 16x PCIe performance as well as a 2.0 PCIe specification over our current mother board’s P35 chipset which is limited to 1.0 PCIe specification and 16x + 4X Crossfire.  Part 4 continues with Catalyst 8-10 and final comparisons which will tell you if you need to upgrade.

Stay tuned.  All four parts of our testing has been completed and we think we have some very interesting articles for you to read very shortly.

Mark Poppin

ABT Editor