ATI Radeon HD 4890 vs. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on April 2, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
NVIDIA is competitive at this new price point of $250 depending on what resolution you look at. We also see some improvement from NVIDIA's new 185 series driver and get a new feature to play with in the form of Ambient Occlusion. We did look at PhysX and CUDA again, and, while we may be interested in what is made possible by them, there is still a stark lack of compelling content that takes advantage of these technologies. We can't recommend prioritizing PhysX and CUDA over performance, and performance is where a GPU needs to compete. Luckily for NVIDIA, the GTX 275 does.
The fact that its worst-case performance is still better than the GTX 260 core 216 and in the best case, it can hit that of the GTX 280 was a plus for the GTX 275. It often posted performance more in line with its bigger brothers than a $50+ cheaper part. This is pretty sweet for a $250 card, especially as many games these days rely very heavily on shader performance. The GeForce GTX 275 is a good fit for this price point, and is a good option. But then there's the Radeon HD 4890.
The 4890, basically a tweaked and overclocked 4870, does improve performance over the 4870 1GB and puts up good competition for the GTX 275. On a pure performance level the 4890 and GTX 275 trade blows at different resolutions. The 4890 tends to look better at lower resolutions while the GTX 275 is more competitive at high resolutions. At 1680 x 1050 and 1920 x 1200 the 4890 is nearly undefeated. At 2560 x 1600, it seems to be pretty much a wash between the two cards.
At the same time, there are other questions, like that of availability. With these parts performing so similarly, and price being pretty well equal, the fact that AMD parts can be bought starting today and we have to wait for the NVIDIA parts is an advantage for AMD. However, we have to factor in the fact that AMD driver support doesn't have the best track record as of late for new game titles. Add in the fact that NVIDIA's developer relations seem more effective than AMD's could mean more titles that run better on NVIDIA hardware in the future. So what to go with? Really it depends on what resolutions you're targeting and what the prices end up being. If you've got a 30" display then either card will work, it's just up to your preference and the items we talked about earlier. If you've got a 24" or smaller display (1920x1200 or below), then the Radeon HD 4890 is the card for you.
AMD tells us that most retailers will feature mail in rebates of $20, a program which was apparently underwritten by AMD. Could AMD have worried they weren't coming in at high enough performance late in the game and decided to try and throw an extra incentive in there? Either way, not everyone likes a mail in rebate. I much prefer the instant variety and mail-in-rebate offers do not make decisions for me. We still compare products based on their MSRP (which is likely the price they'll be back at once the rebate goes away). This is true for both AMD and NVIDIA parts.
There will also be overclocked variants of the GTX 275 to compete with the overclocked variants from AMD. The overclock on the AMD hardware is fairly modest, but does make a difference and the same holds true for the GTX 275 products in early testing. We'll have to take a look at how such parts compare in the future along with SLI and CrossFire. In the meantime, we have another interesting battle at the $250 price point.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
294 Comments
View All Comments
SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
LOL - antoher hidden red rooster bias uncovered...Umm... look, when there's a new ati card, there's no talking about crunching down on former ati cards - OK ? That just is NOT allowed.
" No mention of the death of the HD 4850X2 as the HD4890 trashes the power consumption, price, availability, speed and OC-ability "
Dude, not allowed !
PS- Don't mention how this card is going to smash the "4870" "profit" "flagship" - gee now just don't talk about it - don't mention it - look, there's no rooster crying in fps gaming, ok ?
Torquer350 - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
Props to ATi for delivering a very compelling product. I admit I've always been an Nvidia fan, and I'll generally forgive them a single generational performance loss to ATi, but I've recommended ATi products recently to friends due to their resurgent desirability.That being said, am I the only one who detects a subtle but distinct underlying disdain for Nvidia? So they tried to market the hell out of you - so what? They are trying to sell cards here. Why the surprise that sales and marketing people are trying to do exactly what they're paid to do? Congrats for being smart enough to see it for what it is, but jeers for making an issue of it as if its some kind of new tactic. Has AMD/ATi never done the same?
CUDA and PhysX are compelling, but I agree not a good reason to overcome a significant gap between Nvidia and ATi at a comparable price point. You clearly agree, but it seems like what little praise you offer is begrudging in the extreme.
Nvidia has definitely acted in bad form in a number of ways throughout this very lengthy generation of hardware. However, you guys are journalists and in my opinion should make a more concerted effort to leave the vitriol and sensationalism at the door, regardless of who it is that is being reviewed. That kind of emotional reaction, personal opinion, irritation, etc is better served for your blog posts than a review article.
Love the site, keep up the good work. Nobodys perfect.
SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
Yeah thanks for noticing, too. It been going on a long time. Notice how now, suddenly when ati doesn't have 2560 sewn up - it doesn't matter anymore ... LOLOf course the "brilliiantly unbiased" reviewers will claim they did a poll on monitor resolution useage, and therefore sudenyl came to their conclusion about $2,000.00 monitor users, when they tiddled and taddled for years about 10 bucks between framerates and nvidia ati - and chose ati for the 10 bucks difference.
Yep, 10 bucks matters, but $1,700.00 difference for a monitor doesn't matter until they take a poll. Now they didn't say it, but they will - wait it's coming...
Just like I kept pointing out when they raved about ati taking the 30" resolution and not much if anything else, that declaring it the winner wasn't right. Now of course, when ati isn't winning the 30 rez - yes, well, they finally caught on. No bias here ! Nothing to notice, pure professionalism, and hatred of cuda and physx for it's lack of ability to run on ati cards is fully justified, and should offer NO advantage to nvidia when making a purchase decision ! LOL
OMG ! they're like GONERZ man.
Dried - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
Best review so far. And nice cards BTW, they are both worth it, but i like the 4890 betterFunny thing is that GTX 275 > GTX 280.
But my guess is that GTX 280 benefits more from overclocking.
Arbie - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
Because of my PC's location I am concerned with idle power, and purchase based on that if other specs and price are even comparable. Peak power doesn't matter as long as it's within the capability of my 800W PSU.I bought an ATI HD4850 last year because it idled significantly lower than the 4870, and it would run everything in sight. A great card. The Nvidia GTX 260 and 280 had even better performance vs idle power ratios but were way too expensive at the time.
So I think Nvidia takes the laurels now with the GTX 275. 30W less (!) than the HD 4890 at idle, with essentially the same performance. If I were shopping now it would be a VERY easy choice.
I really hope ATI can get their idle power down too. They need to pay more attention to throttling back or downpowering circuits that aren't needed in 2D modes.
helldrell666 - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
Use the radeon bios editor to edit the 2d profile and then downclock your gpu frequencies.OCedHrt - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
The power consumption on the 4890 really interests me. While it uses more than 275 at idle, it uses less under load. Also, it is a significant drop from the 4870 which is a slower card.bobvodka - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
So, on the charge of drivers; I've gone from recently having a GT8800GTX 512Meg to a HD4870X2 2gig and if anything I've seen stability improvements between the two. Or to put it another way NV drivers were bluescreening my Vista install when I was doing nothing more than using my TV card and it was crashing in a DirectDraw DLL. Nice.Not to say AMD hasn't had issues; trying to use hardware acceleration with any bluray play back resulted in a bluescreen due to the gpu going into an infinite loop. Nice. Fortunately, unlike the DDraw error above, I could at least turn off hardware acceleration (and honestly, with an i7 it's not like I needed it).
So, stability wise it's a wash.
As for the memory usage complaints about CCC;
Unless it is running it is NOT taking up physical memory. Like many things in the windows world it might load something into the background but this is quickly paged out and doesn't live in ram. Even if it does living in ram for a short period of time being inactive it will be paged out as soon as memory presure requires it. The simple fact is unused ram is wasted ram; this is why I'm glad Vista uses 10gig of my 12 for cache when it isn't needed for anything else, it speeds up the system.
Cuda.. well, the idea is nice and I like the idea but as mentioned in the article unless you have cross vendor support it isn't as useful as it could be. OpenCL and, for games, DX11's compute shaders are going to make life intresting for both Cuda and AMD's option. I will say this much; I suspect you'll get better performance from NV, AMD and indeed Larrabee when it appears by going 'to the metal' with them but as with many things in the software world you have to trade something for speed.
Now, PhysX.. well, this one is even more fun (and I guess it effects Cuda as well to a degree). Right now, with Vista, you can't run more than one vendor's gfx card in your system at once due to how WDDM1.0 works; so it's AMD or NV and that's your choice. With Win7 however the rules change slight and you'll be able to run, with WDDM1.1 drivers, cards from both vendors at once. Right away this paints an intresting landscape for those intrested; if you want an AMD card but also want some PhysX hardware power than you'll be able to slide in a 'cheap' NV series card to use for that reason (or indeed if you have an old series 8 laying about use that if the driver supports it).
Of course, with Havoc going OpenCL and being free for games which retail for <$10 (iirc) this is probably going to be much of a muchness in the end, but it's an intresting idea at least.
SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
Except you can run 2 nvidia cards, one for gaming, the other for physx.... so red fanboys are sol."Right now, with Vista, you can't run more than one vendor's gfx card in your system at once due to how WDDM1.0 works; so it's AMD or NV and that's your choice. "
WRONG, it's TWO nvidia or just ONE ati. Hello - you knew it - but you didn't say it that way - makes ati look bad, and we just cannot have that here....
Rhino2 - Monday, April 13, 2009 - link
The hell are you talking about? Crossfire works in vista just fine.