This past year has been exciting in the video card market. We have seen simultaneous launches from both AMD/ATI and Nvidia countering each others new products. This past April, the two heavyweights put forward the HD 4890 and the GTX 275 in the ring to go toe-to-toe with each other. In this review we compare the overclocked versions against each other.

Although not a new architecture, the GTX 275 is essentially an upgrade over the GTX 260+ just as the HD 4890 is faster than the older HD 4870. The GTX 275 is basically one half of the dual-GPU GTX 295 video card but has faster clocks compared to Nvidia’s flagship.

The GTX 275 features the same number of shaders (240) as the GTX 285,  but with a slightly cut-down memory interface which is 448-bit wide vs. the GTX 285’s 512-bit interface. The GTX 275 comes with 896 MB of video memory, while the GTX 285 comes with 1GB and the GTX 295 comes with 1792 MB (896 MB per GPU).

The card that we are looking at today comes from Galaxy, and it is overclocked out of the box.

The clock speeds on the Galaxy GTX 275 OC (over the reference clocks are):

• 650 MHz core (vs. 633 MHz)
• 1475 MHz shader (vs. 1404 MHz)
• 1200 MHz memory (vs. 1134 MHz)

Let’s take a look at our test subject.

In this test we will be comparing this GTX 275 to the Diamond HD 4890 XOC which is also overclocked out of the box with clocks of 925 Mhz core/4200 MHz memory up from its reference clocks of 850 MHz core/3900 MHz memory. We did a review of the Diamond HD 4890 XOC here & here.

Specifications

(mistake corrected, thank you for pointing it out)

Test System

• Intel Q9450 @ 3.2 GHz
• GIGABYTE EX-38 DS4 F5 BIOS
• GEIL 4 GB ( 2x 2GB ) Dual Channel RAM @ 800 MHz
• Visiontek ATI Radeon HD 4870
• Galaxy Nvidia Geforce GTX 275 OC
• Diamond ATI Radeon HD 4890 XOC
• Windows 7 Ultimate x64 RTM
• Intel Chipset Device Software Version: 9.1.1.1019
• ATI Catalyst 9.10
• Nvidia Geforce Driver 195.39 Beta

Test Notes

• PhysX was disabled in the Nvidia Control Panel.
• All Catalyst & Nvidia control panel settings were at default.
• Highest possible settings were used wherever available. This means that DX10.1 was used on ATI cards wherever available, and DX10 on Nvidia cards.
• Also 4xAA/16xAF was used wherever possible with the highest settings unless specified otherwise.

GPU-Z Shot

Unboxing Video & Image Gallery

The box that I received for this card is the longest one that I have ever seen. After taking out the card, I can fully understand why the box is so big. The card weighs a lot with its massive cooler. To prevent any damage to the video card during shipping, the video card is surrounded by a lot of foam in the box. This triple fan cooler is so large that the card will occupy three slots in your case. It will be impossible to use this card in SLI on some motherboards if the PCI Express slots are only one expansion slot apart.

Another interesting fact that you will notice about the cooler is that it is actually longer than the card’s PCB which makes the overall length of the GTX 275 longer. Make sure that you have enough space in your case before buying this video card. The cooler is made by Arctic Cooling and is called the Accelero Xtreme GTX. The product page for this cooler can be found here.

The reference GTX 275 from Nvidia uses a pair of two 6-pin power connectors, but this overclocked model uses one 8-pin connector and one 6-pin connector. Like the GTX 285 and the GTX 260, this video card supports three-way SLI. Output options on the card are dual-link DVI, HDMI and HDTV output with the included dongle.

Here are few images to wet your appetite before we show you the unboxing video:

It’s now time to take a look at the unboxing video

Taking the cooler off of your video card may void your warranty. Doing it improperly could also damage your video card. Be careful while doing the procedure shown below and do it at your own risk. You have been warned!

With the disclaimer out of the way, we can show you how to take the cooler off of the card and show you what is underneath. But first the images and then the video.

Temperature

We fired up our copy of Furmark 1.7.0 and rendered the fur at 640×480 with no AA on “xtreme burning mode”.

Furmark represents one of the most intensive tests that a GPU can run. Thus temperatures and power consumption measured with Furmark represent the worst-case scenario. Although no game today puts as much load on the GPU as Furmark does, should a game do that in future, you will be ready armed with the knowledge gained by testing with Furmark – knowing how hot your card can get and how much power it can consume.

According to its developer, “Furmark is a very intensive OpenGL benchmark that uses fur rendering algorithms to measure the performance of the graphics card. Fur rendering is especially adapted to overheat the GPU and that’s why Furmark is also a perfect stability and stress test tool (also called GPU burner) for the graphics card. This benchmark requires an OpenGL 2.0 compliant graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 5/6/7/8 (and higher), AMD/ATI Radeon 9600 (and higher) or a S3 Graphics Chrome 400 series with the latest graphics drivers.”

Furmark was left running for a period of 10 minutes after which the final load temperature was measured. The ambient temperature was 24-25C.

With that massive cooler strapped to the PCB you would expect pretty low temperatures from this video card. And that is exactly what you get. Idle temperature of 34C for a GPU that has 1.4 billion transistors, is a great feat.

Overclocking

Furmark Stability test was used to find the maximum stable overclock. We used EVGA’s Precision Tuner for overclocking. After all the dust was settled, here are the overclocked frequencies. 730MHz/1656MHz/1325MHz (core/shader/memory). I wish it would have overclocked more since it comes with such a heavy duty cooler.

Power Usage (Total System Consumption)

Furmark 1.7.0 was run in extreme burning mode with the fur rendered at 640×480 with no AA. Measuring power usage with Furmark is the worst case scenario. Normally games are never able to put so much load on the GPU as Furmark does.

GTX 275 is able to drop it’s clocks and voltage used in idle mode to very low states, which is why it consumes a lot less power than the Radeons.

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3DMark 06

3DMark06 is a PC benchmark suite designed to test the DirectX9 performance of your graphics card. 3DMark06 is the most downloaded benchmark and the ORB database of 3DMark 06 results, maintained by Futuremark, now contains over 8.5 million 3DMark06 benchmark scores from around the world. Three main graphic tests from 3DMark05 were carried over to 3DMark06 and updated. The tests included in 3DMark 06 feature HDR rendering, shadow mapping, water surfaces created using pixel shaders with HDR refraction, HDR reflection, depth fog and Gerstner wave functions, heterogeneous fog, light scattering and cloud blending, etc.

3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed to test the DirectX10 performance of your graphics card. It is the latest addition to the 3DMark series. As it is a DX10-only benchmark, it only runs on Windows Vista and Windows 7. 3DMark Vantage is composed of four full-bore benchmarking tests (2 CPU tests and 2 GPU tests) and 6 feature tests. This test makes good use of multi-core CPUs and can even use Nvidia’s PhysX technology on its GeForce lineup of video cards.

The GTX 275 and HD 4890 end up pretty much even in the 3DMark Vantage test.

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Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare

Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare was one of the most successful games of 2007.  It was the top-selling game worldwide for 2007, selling over seven million copies by January 2008. It uses a proprietary game engine that includes features such as true world-dynamic lightning, HDR lighting effects, dynamics shadows, and depth of field. It features a fictional story set in the near-future. The most well-received part of the game is its multiplayer modes, where you earn experience points for kills and completing certain tasks online. These experience points unlock certain abilities and new and more powerful guns which can tip the balance in your favor in online matches.

For testing this game, I recorded a timedemo on the “Vacant” map. The demo was recorded while trying to capture some of the most graphically intense sections of the game like throwing a smoke grenade and then walking and shooting in it which really brings all the cards to their knees resulting in the minimum FPS. The demo was played back at normal speed with the demo command from the console and the results were recorded by FRAPS

GTX 275 is off to a great start in our benchmark suite with a very convincing lead over the HD 4890. With an almost 17 FPS advantage, does this set the trend for future benchmarks to come ? Will the HD 4890 be able to stage a comeback ? Let’s move on and find out.

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Call of Juarez

Call of Juarez is one of the earliest DirectX10 games from the Polish developer Techland. It is a First Person Shooter set in the Wild West, loosely based on a number of Western movie hits which were popular in the sixties and early seventies. Call of Juarez uses the Chrome Engine which utilizes modern game programming technologies and techniques such as  High Dynamic Range (HDR) rendering, support for all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques including normal mapping, relief mapping, self-shadowing using ambient occlusion, subsurface scattering simulating diffusion and diffraction of rays finding their way through translucent objects; realistic water surfaces based on dynamic liquid system, real time HDR reflections and refraction, fading underwater visibility based on distance.

We used the benchmark tool that is added to the game with the patch 1.1.1.0.

Call of Juarez has been one of the games that has always favored hardware on the red side. And the trend continues with these video cards too. The leading role from the previous benchmark is reversed here, with the HD 4890 getting a pretty convincing win. With a 10 FPS advantage over the GTX 275, the HD 4890 also beats the overclocked GTX 275 by a pretty convincing margin of 6 FPS.

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Crysis Warhead

Crysis series is one of the most beautiful set of games to grace our PC screens to date and they can bring the highest end PCs to their knees.

Crysis Warhead, developed by Crytek, is an expansion to the original Crysis. Crysis Warhead follows Sergeant Michael “Psycho” Sykes, a formerly Non-Playable Character (NPC) from the original Crysis, as he faces his own trials and challenges on the other side of the island which is during the time period of the first game.

Framebuffer Crysis Warhead benchmark tool was used for testing. 64-bit executable was used with DX10, 2xAA and all enthusiast settings. The level that we benched is ‘Ambushed’.

The HD 4890 XOC edges out a narrow win over the GTX 275. But the GTX 275 takes back the lead when it is overclocked.

If you are wondering why the graph lengths are not the same in the above image, it is because the Crysis Warhead benchmark plays as fast as possible, so faster cards are able to complete the benchmark sooner.

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Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 is a free roaming first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. Although it uses the name of the original Far Cry game, the similarities end right there. Far Cry 2 is a completely different story set in a completely different environment.

Far Cry 2 uses the Dunia game engine developed by Ubisoft’s Montreal development team for Far Cry 2.  Dunia means “world”, “earth” or “living” in Arabic but also used in many languages with Arabic loanwords including Punjabi, Persian, Nepali, Bengali, Hindi, Indonesian, Kurdish, Turkish, Malay, Marathi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marvadi and Swahili.  To portray the African setting in the game as realistically as possible, the development team went to Africa to study how things work there. The Dunia engine features Dynamic Weather, dynamic fire propagation (influenced by weather system), realistic fire, physics, full day/night cycles. Realistic fire is a high point of this game. It has the best looking depiction of a fire in a video game to date. The engine takes advantage of DirectX9 and DirectX 10 technologies.

I used the benchmark tool that comes with the game.

The GTX 275 enjoys a narrow lead over the HD 4890 in the average FPS department, but takes a considerable lead as far as the minimum FPS are concerned. The HD 4870 lags behind the other cards by a great margin, probably due to being limited by its 512 MB video memory at this high resolution.

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GRID

Race Driver: GRID is the latest addition to the TOCA Touring Car series by Codemasters. GRID is a hybrid between arcade and simulator of mainly road racing that consists of 43 cars featuring very fast racing, awesome graphics, along with a great damage model that leads to some of the most fantastic crashes we have seen in a game. There are several types of competitions for different cars: GT races, open wheel races, demolition derbies, etc.  There are also several tracks from different countries, including Japan, the United States and European tracks, such as Le Mans and Spa Francorchamps.  A track racing through the streets of Milan is also available.

I use the GRID Demo v1.1 for the benchmark. I take the first place in the first lap and use the second lap for benchmarking purposes.

All of the cards are able to play this game pretty smoothly without any hiccups. The HD 4890 edges out the GTX 275 by about 7 FPS, while the overclocked GTX 275 matches the performance of the HD 4890 except for the minimum FPS.

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HAWX

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. (”High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron”) is an aerial warfare video game developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft.  Players have the opportunity to take the throttle of over 50 famous aircraft and fly them over real world locations and cities in photo-realistic environments created with satellite data. This game is a more of an arcade take on flying, with the aircraft able to do drifts in mid air like a car does on the road. The controls are easy with the aircraft handling more like a car but it is an immensely fun game.

The HD 4890 enjoys a slight lead over the GTX 275, which is probably due to the use of DX10.1 render path which provides improved anti-aliasing performance over the DX10 render path.

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Lost Planet:Colonies Edition

Lost Planet Extreme Condition: Colonies Edition is a gold edition version of Lost Planet: Extreme Condition developed and published by Capcom for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC. It has the honor of being the first DirectX10 game. The Colonies Edition includes new multiplayer maps, a Human vs Akrid multiplayer mode, and a selection of new multiplayer characters and weapons. The benchmark areas are also different from the non-colonies edition.

The game uses the MT Framework Engine. MT stands for “Multi-Thread”, “Meta Tools” and “Multi-Target”.

I used the Area 1 from the internal benchmark for our benchmarking purposes.

The GTX 275 edges out the HD 4890 by a few FPS. But it shows amazing performance increase when overclocked, gaining around 7 FPS on average.

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Resident Evil 5

Resident Evil is one of the longest spanning video game series. The popularity of this series can be judged from the release of three Hollywood movies, comics, novels and 25 games in the series spanning a variety of platforms. We are testing the latest game in this series to grace the PC platform. The PC version has some new content compared to the console versions including, “new costumes and a new and improved mercenaries mode with three times as many enemies.” This game features support for Nvidia’s GeForce 3D Vision glasses. According to Capcom, RE5 will also be the first PC game to include support for “Stereoscopic 3D in all of its cut scenes.”

A 3D Vision Benchmark has been made available at nzone website for those of you looking to try out 3D Vision without buying the game. You can still run the benchmark even if you don’t have Nvidia’s 3D Vision Hardware, but you won’t be able to enjoy the 3D Vision effects. We are using this benchmark for our benchmarking purposes. We are using the “Variable” Benchmark which tests the actual gameplay.

Resident Evil 5 secures another win for the GTX 275. Leading the HD 4890 by about 6 FPS on average, both of the cards provide a smooth gameplay experience with the FPS never dropping below 60.

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Stalker Clear Sky

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky is the second game in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. It is a stand-alone prequel to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl. The game consists of a roughly 50/50 mix of new areas and old, remodeled areas from the previous game. The X-ray graphics engine, originally used in S.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadow of Chernobyl, has been updated to version 1.5 and includes DirectX 10 support. With patch 1.5.06 the game now supports DirectX 10.1 available on ATI video cards. Additionally, the AI received an overhaul to accommodate the new faction wars feature. Advancements made in version 1.5 include volumetric light (a.k.a. ‘God-rays’), volumetric smoke, volumetric fire, soft water, dynamic wet surfaces (with water streaming down the sides of surfaces), depth-of-field blur, DirectX 10 support, SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) and more.

I used the stand-alone “official” benchmark by Clear Sky’s creators. 2xAA was used here.

As we have seen throughout our benchmarking, the GTX 275 and the HD 4890 keep on trading wins. The GTX 275 won the previous round with the Resident Evil 5, now it’s the  HD 4890s turn to take the lead by about 4 FPS on average, with DX10.1 again offering some help.

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Conclusion

After testing with so many games you would expect to see a clear winner, but it’s the exact opposite of that what we found from our testing with so many games. The results of the tests were like two people debating, each coming up with one good point after the other. After all the dust settled on our testing, GTX 275 won in 4 games while the HD 4890 won in 5 games. But after overclocking the GTX 275, it got closer to HD 4890 performance and sometimes even managed to better the HD 4890 in the games that the stock-clocked GTX 275 lost.

Pros-

• Comes with aftermarket cooler
• Overclocked out of the box
• Runs cool & very quiet
• PhysX enabled
• HDMI output
• Nvidia’s 3D Vision ready
• Galaxy’s 24/7 tech support

Cons-

• Large cooler, the card covers three slots
• Cooler is very long, the video card may not fit in some cases

Galaxy’s GTX 275 is an interesting prospect if you are in the process of buying a video card. It provides good performance, plus additional features such as onboard HDMI output, PhysX, 3D Vision. Overall it provides a good value when compared against similarly performing video cards from the competition. I will give it the ABT recommended award.

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«1. Introduction2. Specifications & Test System3. Unboxng Video & Image Gallery4. Temperature, Power & Overclocking5. 3DMark 06 & 3DMark Vantage6. Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare7. Call of Juarez8. Crysis Warhead9. Far Cry 210. GRID11. HAWX12. Lost Planet Colonies Edition13. Resident Evil 514. Stalker Clear Sky15. Conclusion16. View All»