Radeon HD 4890 vs GeForce GTX 275

Evaluation criteria

Before delving into performance figures and so forth, we want to re-establish the prices we're using for this comparison. While Scan does have a Palit GeForce GTX 275 for £199.99 inc. VAT, this card sports a custom cooler and possibly other departures from the reference design that we tested. As the changes that Palit has made will certainly affect the power consumption, noise and thermal performance - and possibly the performance - of the GTX 275, we can only use a price for a partner-branded reference card with the data we have collected.

This means that we'll be using a price of £220 inc. VAT for the GTX 275.

Meanwhile, HD 4890 cards also cost roughly £220 inc. VAT, so the following comparisons will be entirely about performance. This is despite Novatech having a stock-speed PowerColor HD 4890 for £209.99 inc. VAT - this seems to be freakishly low price for only one manufacturer, so we're placing it one side.

We also want to make clear that the following conclusions will be based on the ForceWare 185.65 beta driver performance figures for the GTX 275 rather than the ForceWare 182.50. This is because, despite Nvidia's driver download site, the newer release 185 beta driver is Nvidia's preferred driver.

Conclusions

The performance offered by ATI's Radeon HD 4890 and Nvidia's GeForce GTX 275 is actually fairly similar. Very rarely does one card soundly beat the other to such a degree that you'd have to dial down AA, resolution or detail settings if you chose one over the other. In games such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, Fallout 3 and Race Driver: GRID the two cards are fairly evenly matched, with the HD 4890 only slightly ahead in latter two games.

Crysis in DX10 mode clearly favours the GTX 275 to the tune of a few extra fps, while the HD 4890 can't handle the AA of Far Cry 2 in DX10/10.1 mode. In DX9 mode, the GTX 275 is faster than the HD 4890 at every resolution too. The frankly rubbish Call of Duty: World at War also favours the Nvidia hardware, with the GTX 275 ahead by a few fps at every resolution.

That the HD 4890 is also noticeably louder than the GTX 275 when either card is idle, under load, or folding (especially when folding, where the HD 4890 cooler does a great impression of a hair-dryer) also counts against it. As usual, ATI's folding performance didn't match that of the Nvidia cards and the horrendous noise that the HD 4890 made when folding means that even casual folders running the client in the background while working or web browsing should look elsewhere for their graphics card.

Both cards proved very overclockable, even if our sample HD 4890 didn't manage the 1GHz GPU frequency that ATI claimed it should; Sapphire is currently finalising a Vapor-X cooler for the Radeon HD 4890, which could help matters and we hope to see some other custom cooler cards to see what a 1GHz GPU can achieve.

Final Thoughts...

All of the above presents a problem for ATI. To get more speed from its RV770 (HD 4870) GPU, it's had to stretch the design to allow the use of fatter copper interconnects to help maintain signal integrity and place more silicon between transistors to keep power leakage down as it raises the clock speed. But these tweaks have produced a hot and loud card.

Meanwhile, Nvidia has merely tweaked the GT200 design and shoved it into the market at a very aggressive price. Worse still, the GTX 275 is either as fast or faster than the Radeon HD 4890 in every game we've tested with, and at folding. And it's quieter.

For ATI to deliver more performance to trump Nvidia's GTX 275 (let's just leave the GTX 285 to wither and die, shall we?) ATI will have to push the clock speeds even higher, producing an even hotter, more expensive and probably louder card. Either that, or it'll have to look into a re-vamped HD 4850 X2 card based on a pair of RV790 GPUs (likely downclocked and with the GDDR3 memory controller enabled).

As it stands, the GTX 275 with the ForceWare 185.65 beta driver is the clear choice, despite those PowerColor HD 4890 cards for £210 inc. VAT.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 275 896MB

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

ATI Radeon HD 4890 1GB

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

Score Guide