Radeon HD 4890 vs GeForce GTX 275

It's all about a driver update

Originally, this review was running behind schedule after a number of hardware issues during our testing, and the plan was for us to publish the finished article early yesterday evening. However, when we were doing our final proof yesterday afternoon, we came across a number of anomalies in the data we had recorded.

As is typical practice at bit-tech, we're not in the business of publishing suspect benchmark data – we've always prided ourselves on delivering accurate benchmark results. Only with accurate and plausible performance numbers are we in a position to recommend one product over another. The last thing we want to do is give you the wrong advice on which product is best and which is worth your cash.

The problem we saw was with the GTX 275 outperforming the GTX 285 in some situations - an odd situation given that the GTX 285 has superior specs and higher clock speeds. This strange performance was down to the driver versions that Nvidia had supplied. What usually happens during a graphics card launch is that we receive a driver that is only qualified on the new card, and Nvidia recommends that we use the latest publicly-available driver to test the other cards with.

As part of the GeForce GTX 275's launch, Nvidia has also rolled out a new driver release – ForceWare release 185 – which promises a number of performance improvements thanks mainly to improved memory management. Nvidia initially supplied us with ForceWare 185.63 to use with the GTX 275, and we used ForceWare 182.08 WHQL for the GTX 285 and GTX 260-216 cards.

At no point did Nvidia state that it was also releasing a ForceWare 182 WHQL driver for the GeForce GTX 275 on the day of launch. This is the driver the the Nvidia driver download site is currently recommending - tell the site that you have a GeForce GTX 275 graphics card and Vista 64-bit and the site will tell you to download ForceWare 182.50 (correct at time of writing). This driver does not have the memory management optimisations of the ForceWare 185 driver that we were sent for pre-launch testing.

What we ended up with was a situation where the GeForce GTX 275 combined with the 185 driver compared more than favourably with Nvidia's existing GeForce GTX 200 products, which, as per standard practice, were tested with the latest-available release 182 WHQL driver at the time of testing (182.08 WHQL).


Moreover, nowhere on the driver download page does Nvidia recommend the ForceWare 185.65 driver to users, although it was the only driver we were given prior to the launch. To find the 185.65 beta driver, you must trawl through the Beta and archived driver sections under the Other drivers section. This sends out completely the wrong message, since consumers are going to find it very difficult to get the level of performance from their GTX 275 card they see in media coverage.

In the following graphs, you will therefore see performance figures for the GTX 275 tested with both drivers. We've highlighted the ForceWare 182.50 driver results in green as this isn't Nvidia's preferred driver (despite what the driver website says).

We spoke to Ben Berraondo, Nvidia's UK PR Manager, this morning to air our concerns and frustrations after spending most of last night fighting to get a full set of GeForce GTX 275 benchmarks with the release 182 driver. He understood our concerns and accepted that the situation "could have been handled better." He added that:

"Nvidia strives to make the latest drivers are available to our enthusiast audience to give them the best possible performance, this naturally means we do release beta drivers to the public. Finding these on our website could be easier and I will be feeding this back within Nvidia. As it is, I encourage all GT200 series card owners to use the 185.65 driver for maximum performance in games. To find these on our website, please ensure you select the option to include beta drivers in your search."

And another thing...

We agree with Nvidia that the ForceWare 185.65 beta driver is available to the public, but only if you search through the beta driver section and, what's more, the 185.65 driver also supports all other members of the GeForce GTX 200 series, GeForce 9-series and some of the GeForce 8-series. Nvidia didn't communicate this fact to us at any point, and it wasn't until we spoke to a member of Nvidia's technical marketing team in the US late last night that we understood exactly what was going on. This is despite a 90 minute briefing call with Nvidia on the GeForce GTX 275 a couple of days before the launch of the card.

In fact, the communication from Nvidia about the driver update from 185.63 to 185.65 said nothing about enabling compatibility with other cards. Nvidia sent us an email on April 1st saying the following when it uploaded the publicly available ForceWare 185.65 driver to the press-access FTP:

"If you have already completed your testing of GeForce GTX 275, there is NO need to re-test with the 185.65 driver package. The only material differences between the newer 185.65 and the current 185.63 is a fix for Dawn of War 2 SLI scaling and some other non-performance bugs. In your stories about GeForce GTX 275, please ensure your readers know that the public driver will be 185.65 and not the 183.63 that you used for your testing."

Had we had the option (and the time), we would have used ForceWare 185.65 on all the Nvidia cards we tested for this article.

It's a shame that this has happened, because as you'll see over the coming pages, the GTX 275 is pretty strong with the ForceWare 182 driver. The ForceWare 185.65 driver is clearly an excellent piece of work from the Nvidia driver team. However, given the chain of events outlined above, the situation has left us thoroughly disgruntled.

As the ForceWare 185.65 driver is Nvidia's preferred driver for GTX 275 (despite what the driver download site suggests), all the performance analysis for this article will use this data. The performance of the ForceWare 182.50 driver has been included in green so you can compare apples to apples performance of the GTX 260-216, GTX 275 and GTX 285 on similar driver builds.