I'm not really sure why we have NDAs on these products anymore. Before we even got our Radeon HD 4890, before we were even briefed on it, NVIDIA contacted us and told us that if we were working on a review to wait. NVIDIA wanted to send us something special.

Then in the middle of our Radeon HD 4890 briefing what do we see but a reference to a GeForce GTX 275 in the slides. We hadn't even laid hands on the 275, but AMD knew what it was and where it was going to be priced.

If you asked NVIDIA what the Radeon HD 4890 was, you'd probably hear something like "an overclocked 4870". If you asked AMD what the GeForce GTX 275 was, you'd probably get "half of a GTX 295".

The truth of the matter is that neither one of these cards is particularly new, they are both a balance of processors, memory, and clock speeds at a new price point.

As the prices on the cards that already offered a very good value fell, higher end and dual GPU cards remained priced significantly higher. This created a gap in pricing between about $190 and $300. AMD and NVIDIA saw this as an opportunity to release cards that fell within this spectrum, and they are battling intensely over price. Both companies withheld final pricing information until the very last minute. In fact, when I started writing this intro (Wednesday morning) I still had no idea what the prices for these parts would actually be.

Now we know that both the Radeon HD 4890 and the GeForce GTX 275 will be priced at $250. This has historically been a pricing sweet spot, offering a very good balance of performance and cost before we start to see hugely diminishing returns on our investments. What we hope for here is a significant performance bump from the GTX 260 core 216 and Radeon HD 4870 1GB class of performance. We'll wait till we get to the benchmarks to reveal if that's what we actually get and whether we should just stick with what's good enough.

At a high level, here's what we're looking at:

  GTX 285 GTX 275 GTX 260 Core 216 GTS 250 / 9800 GTX+
Stream Processors 240 240 216 128
Texture Address / Filtering 80 / 80 80 / 80 72/72 64 / 64
ROPs 32 28 28 16
Core Clock 648MHz 633MHz 576MHz 738MHz
Shader Clock 1476MHz 1404MHz 1242MHz 1836MHz
Memory Clock 1242MHz 1134MHz 999MHz 1100MHz
Memory Bus Width 512-bit 448-bit 448-bit 256-bit
Frame Buffer 1GB 896MB 896MB 512MB
Transistor Count 1.4B 1.4B 1.4B 754M
Manufacturing Process TSMC 55nm TSMC 55nm TSMC 65nm TSMC 55nm
Price Point $360 ~$250 $205 $140

 

  ATI Radeon HD 4890 ATI Radeon HD 4870 ATI Radeon HD 4850
Stream Processors 800 800 800
Texture Units 40 40 40
ROPs 16 16 16
Core Clock 850MHz 750MHz 625MHz
Memory Clock 975MHz (3900MHz data rate) GDDR5 900MHz (3600MHz data rate) GDDR5 993MHz (1986MHz data rate) GDDR3
Memory Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit 256-bit
Frame Buffer 1GB 1GB 512MB
Transistor Count 959M 956M 956M
Manufacturing Process TSMC 55nm TSMC 55nm TSMC 55nm
Price Point ~$250 ~$200 $150

 

We suspect that this will be quite an interesting battle and we might have some surprises on our hands. NVIDIA has been talking about their new drivers which will be released to the public early Thursday morning. These new drivers offer some performance improvements across the board as well as some cool new features. Because it's been a while since we talked about it, we will also explore PhysX and CUDA in a bit more depth than we usually do in GPU reviews.

We do want to bring up availability. This will be a hard launch for AMD but not for NVIDIA (though some European retailers should have the GTX 275 on sale this week). As for AMD, we've seen plenty of retail samples from AMD partners and we expect good availability starting today. If this ends up not being the case, we will certainly update the article to reflect that later. NVIDIA won't have availability until the middle of the month (we are hearing April 14th).

NVIDIA hasn't been hitting their launches as hard lately, and we've gotten on them about that in past reviews. This time, we're not going to be as hard on them for it. The fact of the matter is that they've got a competitive part coming out in a time frame that is very near the launch of an AMD part at the same price point. We are very interested in not getting back to the "old days" where we had paper launched parts that only ended up being seen in the pages of hardware review sites, but we certainly understand the need for companies to get their side of the story out there when launches are sufficiently close to one another. And we're certainly not going to fault anyone for that. Not being available for purchase is it's own problem.

From the summer of 2008 to today we've seen one of most heated and exciting battles in the history of the GPU. NVIDIA and AMD have been pushing back and forth with differing features, good baseline performance with strengths in different areas, and incredible pricing battles in the most popular market segments. While AMD and NVIDIA fight with all their strength to win customers, the real beneficiary has consistently been the end user. And we certainly feel this launch is no exception. If you've got $250 to spend on graphics and were wondering whether you should save up for the GTX 285 or save money and grab a sub-$200 part, your worries are over. There is now a card for you. And it is good.

New Drivers From NVIDIA Change The Landscape
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  • Lonyo - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link

    I haven't checked the benchmark numbers yet, but you list Forceware 185's on the NV side, and Cat 8.12's on the AMD side.
    Any reason why you are using brand new drivers for one side and 4 set old drivers on the other?
    Sure, NV might not support a card on older drivers etc, but it's more useful to see newest driver vs newest driver, since there are performance changes from 8.12's to 9.3's in various games, but it just seems silly to use 3+ month old drivers which have been superseded by 3 revisions already. Would anyone buy a brand new card and then use drivers from 3~4 months ago?
  • Gary Key - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link

    The setup chart has been updated. We utilized previous test results from the HD4870 with the 8.12 HotFix drivers. The HD 4890 results were with the 9.4 beta drivers. I just went through a complete retest of the HD4870 with the 9.3 drivers and just started with the 9.4 betas on the AMD 790FX and Intel P45/X58 platforms. Except for a slight performance improvement in Crysis Warhead on the P45/X58 systems, the 9.3 drivers offered zero performance improvements over the 8.12 HotFix. The 9.3 drivers do offer a few updated CF profiles and improved video playback performance, but that is it.
  • Nfarce - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link

    "the 9.3 drivers offered zero performance improvements over the 8.12 HotFix."

    Not only that, but if you read the ATI forums, a lot of people have been having MAJOR problems with 9.2 & 9.3. I downloaded 9.1 for my new 4870 build and have had no problems.
  • SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link

    Now now, ati doesn't have any driver problems, so don't you DARE go spreading that lie. You hear me ?
    Hundreds of red roosters here have NEVER had a driver problem with their ati cards.
    Shame shame.
  • Rhino2 - Monday, April 13, 2009 - link

    Stop posting, seriously, you're stupidity is causing me pain.
  • SiliconDoc - Thursday, April 23, 2009 - link

    Another personal attacker without a single counterpoint to the many lies I've exposed. Good job brainwashed fool.
  • Frallan - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link

    Thanx - good to know.

  • StormyParis - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link

    The Inq or The Reg is pretty adamant about the 275 being there just to spoil the 4890 launch, but never really in stores, and reviewers getting special hi-specs, hi-overclock hand by nVidia instead of the manufacturers.

    Did your card come from an anonymous purchase, or was it a special review sample ?
  • Gary Key - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link

    We mentioned in the article that we received a review sample from NVIDIA. The clock speeds are the same as the retail cards that should start arriving later next week with widespread availability around the week of 4/13. Our retail review samples will arrive early next week.

    As we stated several times in the article, this is a hard launch for AMD and yet another paper launch for NVIDIA, although according to the board partners the GTX275 is coming quickly this time around.
  • evilsopure - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link

    I also feel confused and somewhat misled by the conclusion that the GTX275 is "the marginal leader at this new price point of $250".

    That conclusion doesn't seem true outside of resolutions of 2560x (30" monitor). Plus, $250 cards aren't even targeted or seriously considered for gaming at that resolution.

    I came up with a different conclusion after thoroughly reading this review:

    At the $250 price point and 1680x or 1920x gaming resolutions (where these cards primarily matter), the 4890 holds the majority performance advantage. However, at 2560x the GTX275 performs a bit better than the 4890. Realistically though, at 2560x or on 30+" displays, you're best served by a dual GPU or SLI/Xfire solution.

    Something's fishy about the reviewers' conclusion.

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