Autumn 2009 Graphics Card Upgrade Guide

Performance Analysis

As we’ve known for a while now, it’s not just a graphics card’s pure horse power that leads to smooth in game performance; the driver behind it is just as important. A poorly optimised or glitch-ridden driver is more than capable of robbing a high-end card of a large amount of its theoretical performance.

Conversely, a well written and optimised driver can allow a slower card to over-achieve, squeezing the last drop of performance out of the architecture. Looking at the numbers we've seen with the latest crop of drivers, it's clear that the software behind the cards is having just as much of an effect on performance as the hardware itself.

In Fallout 3 Nvidia’s cards all suffered when anti-aliasing was enabled at both 1,680 x 1,050 and 1,920 x 1,200. A £104 Radeon HD 4870 1GB comfortably outperformed Nvidia’s current top-end £200 GeForce GTX 285 at 1,680 x1,050 with 4x AA for example, and was almost as fast even at 1,920 x 1,200. The problem for Nvidia is rendering the explosions of Fallout 3 quickly enough, and it affects every GT200-based card. The GTX 295 suffered worst of all, with the card completely stalling in three of the tests – hardly a great return from the most expensive card on test.

In comparison to Nvidia’s woes, the ATI cards performed much more reliably, with the HD 4890 in particular performing remarkably well. This card is becoming ever-more affordable and yet bettered the GTX 285 at both 1,920 x 1,200 and 1,680 x 1,050. Unsurprisingly, the HD 5870 is the top dog at every resolution but 2,560. The super-fast single GPU just eats up the post-apocalyptic wasteland like a hungry super mutant.


Switching to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, it’s clear that the drivers are behaving themselves much better. The Nvidia cards performed well at 1,680 x 1,050 before losing out at to ATI at higher resolutions. What’s surprising again, is how well the £104 HD 4870 1GB performed, matching the GTX 285 at 1,920 x 1,200 and 2,560 x 1,600. This is incredible performance for a card that’s half the price of the GTX 285.


Dawn of War 2 is another game where driver optimisation plays a big part, with ATI’s cards performing remarkably well again, especially at 1,680 x 1,050 with 0x AA. At this resolution, the HD 4890 in particular shone, bettering the GT200-based cards and matching the HD 5870. We suspect this is due to CPU limitation, but it’s not as if we’re using a slow CPU, so we’re still impressed by the performance. However, the HD 4890 is a lot noisier than the HD 5870, so some of the money you save when buying the HD 4890 should be spent on a quieter cooler.

Once we increased the AA and resolution in DoW II, things got a lot more competitive, with the HD 4890 duking it out with its direct competitor the GTX 275. Further down the table, it's also worth noting just how far behind Nvidia's ageing GeForce 8800 GT (which performs identically to the GeForce 9800 GT) is falling, even at 1,680 x 1,050 – it could only manage a stuttery 20fps minimum.

There’s a clear turn around in Crysis however, where Nvidia cards have always been strong. All the Nvidia cards compare favourably to the ATI HD 4890 and HD 4870 1GB. The multi-GPU cards were also finally able to fulfil their potential and produce superb frame rates after years of Crysis seemingly hating multi-GPU setups. What’s more surprising is just how much all the cards struggle to handle Crysis even two years after its launch. We used just High detail (rather than Very High), and still only the HD 5870, GTX 295 and HD 4870 X2 were able to offer playable minimum frame rates beyond 1,680 x 1,050. Neither the HD 5870 nor the GTX 295 could handle Crysis at 2,560 x 1,600 with 0x AA.


Our final game performance test of Call of Duty: World at War is perhaps the easiest on the cards we’re testing here, with the GTX 295 in particular having no trouble in cracking minimum frame rates of 60fps even at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4x AA. However, the performance of the GTX 295 dropped off massively beyond this setting - at 2,560 x 1,600 with no AA the GTX 295 manages a meagre 27fps minimum but a mighty 80fps average. This could either be a driver bug, or the consequence of the GPUs of GTX 295 having slightly skinnier memory interfaces and slightly less memory than the HD 5870 and GTX 285 which take the lead at 2,560 x 1,600.

Equally, ATI has some dual-GPU woes in CoD5 as the HD 4870 X2 is terrible in this game. Even at 1,680 x 1,050 with no AA it stuttered along with a minimum of 22fps. However, its average frame rates at every resolution were strong (they never dipped below 56fps, even at 2,560 x 1,600 with 4x AA). As the HD 470 X2 has the same memory interface and memory complement as the much more consistent HD 4890, it looks like the CrossFire division of the Catalyst driver team needs to put a bit more effort into CoD5.

Thermals and Power Consumption

Well, kudos to ATI for its excellent peak and idle GPU temperatures, the new power circuitry of the HD 5870 and the PowerPlay technology of the new GPU are brilliant. This is especially true when you look at ATI’s previous efforts – some of the HD 4000-series cards are the hottest-running cards on test.

Nvidia does well to keep the massive GT200 GPU reasonably cool – all the GT200-based cards are comfortably mid-table. Special praise should go to the new single-PCB GTX 295, which is remarkably cool for a dual-GPU card.

As expected, the HD 5870 also consumes an impressively low amount of power considering the performance is offers. The two dual-GPU cards are, unsurprisingly the most power-thirsty cards when working hard. The other cards are fairly similar in their power draw.

Folding@Home

We’re still trying to get the HD 5870 to fold – the current driver doesn’t seem to support it yet – but we could get ppd and power consumption numbers from the other cards in our folding tests. As expected, Nvidia shone in the ppd stakes, with the dual-GPU GTX 295 generating 15,444ppd and so offering the most ppd/cm3. The 8800 GT made a decent showing of 5,258ppd, while the GT200 cards improved on this yet more. All the ATI cards managed around 2,500ppd no matter what their GPU.

The 8800 GT was the most power-frugal, with the PC sucking 200W from the wall, giving us 26.29ppd/W. Conversely, the GTX 295 consumed the most power, with our PC consuming 315W. This means that it offered us 49.03ppd/W, so it’s actually more power efficient than the 8800 GT. Then again, the GTX 295 is £330 while a 9800 GT (which performs identically to the 800 GT) costs £70 – a 9800 GT yields 75.1ppd/£ to the 46.8ppd/£ of the GTX 295.