GeForce GTX 260: Small Price, Big Performance
ATI rules the markets where buyers seek high performance with maximum AA from small cards and a killer combination of low power consumption and good 3D frame rates (particularly for the Radeon HD 4670 and HD 4770 models). Nvidia rules when it comes to overall performance, and has carved out a great market niche with its GeForce GTX 260 card. The new and improved version with 216 shader processors (SPs) costs about $50 more than the older model with 192 SPs.
Great base-level pricing for the GeForce GTX 260 makes it tough for companies like Zotac to position its custom GeForce GTS 250 with 1 GB of graphics RAM, because the older GeForce GTX 260 runs faster and costs close to the same. The Radeon HD 4850 with 1 GB needn’t fear the competition either, because its performance falls below that of the GeForce GTS 250 and more graphics RAM really matters only for higher resolutions with AA enabled (which itself affects only a handful of games). Its biggest advantage is a low price point of about $135. Against the Zotac GTX 260 with 216 SPs, neither of the custom cards from HIS nor Sapphire gain much ground, even if differences in performance are minimal. Simply put: the GeForce card costs between $35 and $110 less, and gives Zotac a buying advantage. Despite a reference cooler, this card is comfortably quiet and delivers good performance at a decent price.
In conclusion, let’s compare the two ATI Radeon HD 4870 cards. Here, Sapphire comes out ahead, because its card incorporates quieter cooling, offers 2 GB of graphics RAM instead of only one, and costs around $235. The lone advantage to HIS is its competent overclocking, which delivers about 3.5% better performance than the Sapphire model.
wtf?!
no 4850X2, are you people MAD?!
article after recent article tom's has recommended the 4850X2..so why isn't it in this chart???
cheers,
bill
p.s. stuff and nonsense: http://www.eupeople.net/forum
Good article. Can you do the same for SLI and Crossfire including the older cards? Then in the summary show the single and dual card tables side by side?
you guys should go see the comments on the US page...
Surprised that Sapphire submitted the old HD4850 model for testing, the newer one has a much better cooler and with the altered p-states (lowest is 160/250MHz!) its passive at idle.
LOL! Just had a gander at the US page as xizel suggested...
Wondered how Toms had suddenly reversed the set-in-stone law of HD4850>GTS250 and HD4870>(old)GTX260... Well, now we know. They cheated and used dodgy benchmarks (yet again, and I've been forced to say that line A LOT lately!) and then did their usual plug routine.
Looks like Toms is part of nVidia's TWIWMTBP program. Y'know, The Way It Was Meant To Be Paid. Mmm, payola time!
No idea why they still employ Kriess or Roos, no-one in their right mind can believe anything Toms says until those two are locked up on corruption charges in nVidia's inevitable Intel-style anti-competitive suit... XD
Tom's just wrote an article on the 4850X2, yet they fail to include it in the test.......smoke another one guys.
Yeah I agree Solitaire, they have always been Intel/Nvidia biased.
Seems The Last Remnant isn't Radeon optimised...wonder how much nVidia paid them
Upgrading soon, still debating whether to go Phenom II or Core i7 as the cost difference isn't as much as it used to be, but is still around 150+ quid more mainly because the motherboards are more expensive for Intel, plus the need for at least 3 sticks of DDR3...and it seems to me that using SLi/Crossfire on Intel chipsets appears to affect their performance compared to a dedicated chipset for SLi or Crossfire, as i get surprisingly similar results with a 4890 and an OLD Phenom 9850 @ just 2.8GHz...weird, isn't it? Pretty sure some driver trickery is going on here, too.
God, how big must their stockpile be? Or it's just a cheap easy way to make more money to bribe people. Lol.
God, TH has gone downhill hasn't it? I miss the old site layout too!
Also interesting that the Phenom/II based rigs still do really well in games...of course if i were encoding lots of porn to DVD i'd probably get a Core i7, like battle times of old Intel seems slightly faster at encoding.
Also, LOL @ nVidia for getting rid of more G92 based GPUs marked as a GTX250
Hmm.. down here, you can get 2x 4870 1Gb's for 150€/each, totalling the best thing you can get for under 300€. How's that for you?
well i like getting a good deal and i bought a radeon 4830 running it with a fx62 @2.8Ghz and i can play all games at HD with very playable framerates and i reckon if i crossfire it then i'll get about the same as a gtx280 for under £200 so why isnt the best budget card in the bench mark ?
ps toms hardware been using your site for years and years and its a great site well worth reading, sometimes does seem a bit biased one way or another which is fine cos if i was doing the job these big companys could buy my vote for a month or two as well
6gb ram on 32bit windows?
I am a big ATI Fan but upgraded my vga card about 7 months ago... went for the Asus 4870 1gb also tried the Shapire version but could not get it going on my dual screen vista 64 pc so had to swap it at the supplier for a Asus gtx 260 896mb .. must say great card and great software ... pitty I could not get the same support from ATi
I think the normalization is lacking a bit.
What I suggest is a method of weighing the average fps rates based on relevance: supposing the refresh rate of most monitors around these days is 60Hz, i would give 100 points to a card that achieves that value (60fps). A card that achieves less than that would get a percentage of those points (30fps->50 points), but for higher values the 'bonus' should not be as high (ie: for 120fps the card should NOT get 200 points because those extra 60fps are mostly irrelevant; maybe one point/fps over 60 resulting in 160points for 120fps or even half a point resulting in 130).
This would make extra 'power' more relevant in titles that actually NEED it.