Winter 2008 Graphics Performance Update

Final Thoughts...

Before the release 180 drivers arrived the other week, things hadn’t been looking too good for Nvidia. AMD pretty much dominated every price point, offering better value for money than the competing Nvidia product.

Now that they’re here though, Nvidia has significantly closed the gap between its cards and the competition from AMD – this means there’s now no longer a runaway winner at every price point and it’s instead gotten a bit murky. That’s a good thing in our opinion, because it helps to keep the two competitors focused more than ever on winning the performance charts while delivering a better gaming experience for gamers at the same time.

With that said though, there is still one card that is almost unrivalled when it comes to value for money. That card is the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, which not only delivers great performance in comparison to Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 260+ but also clips the GeForce GTX 280’s heels on a number of occasions as well. What’s more, there are clear performance benefits over the Radeon HD 4870 512MB in a number of big titles as well – ultimately, the additional 512MB of memory is just money well spent.

If you are looking for more performance than that, the GeForce GTX 280 looks to be a good option now and we’d dare say it’s a better option than the Radeon HD 4850 X2, especially as a stock GTX 280 is a good £50 cheaper. Admittedly there are times when the 4870 X2 will completely blitz the GTX 280, but there are just as many examples where the dual-GPU behemoth will suffer from performance inconsistencies like those we saw in our Far Cry 2 DirectX 9.0 tests thanks to unoptimised drivers or engine limitations. The bad news is that official driver support from AMD isn’t coming until January, so 4870 X2 owners may well feel a little let down by AMD's drivers here.


The other interesting thing we’ve learned from our new testing is that the GeForce 9800 GTX+ is now a much more compelling option compared to the Radeon HD 4850. OK, so it’s not as clear cut as, say, choosing the 4870 1GB over either the 4870 512MB or GeForce GTX 260+ and there are times when the 4850 is quite a lot faster than the 9800 GTX+, but there are now some scenarios where the 9800 GTX+ is notably faster – we just couldn’t say that just a few short months ago.

Looking at both Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3 shows that Nvidia is now offering at least comparable, if not better performance than the competition from AMD in the latest titles. I’m sure AMD has its own optimisations to do in these games as well, but things are looking a lot more promising for Nvidia at the moment.

A driver update can’t turn the world upside down though and AMD still holds a clear performance lead with the Radeon HD 4870 X2 when the drivers and game engine allow – that’s unlikely to change any time soon as well, based on what we’ve been hearing. In short then, the Radeon HD 4870 1GB is still the card we'd spend our own money on at the moment, but the playing field isn’t quite as clear elsewhere as it used to be – that’s a good thing for consumers though, as there’s now not really a bad buy in sight any more.