Core i7 Christmas '08 Graphics Performance

Conclusions

Well, it's taken a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get to this stage, but we've made it and it's been interesting to see how the landscape has reformed itself with new drivers from both ATI and Nvidia. But we'll come to that in a minute because once we'd got our systems up and running, our benchmarks gushed out like water through the Möhne dam after 617 Squadron had done its work.

Breaking down that dam proved to be a bit of an effort though, as it's taken us more than six weeks to get these new test systems up and running stably. We've spent a lot of time talking in the forums about how X58 motherboards were delivered to the market with pretty immature BIOS versions – the Eclipse SLI was one such board with this problem. We have broken three boards along the way (two down to quite serious bugs in early BIOS revisions – the other fell foul in Rich's torture chamber), but thanks to a lot of hard work from Rich and the MSI BIOS engineers, the Eclipse SLI is now a rock solid board.

The two boards we've had running in parallel to get this article complete have been powering through benchmarks solidly for days on end – with the CPUs running at over 3.7GHz no less – that is an impressive feat in itself. We had one or two crashes along the way, but they were down to bad driver installs and as soon as we'd re-imaged our Windows Vista SP1 installation onto the hard drive and reinstalled the drivers, we didn't encounter the crashes again.

As for the graphics cards, we were surprised in a number of scenarios – by SLI and CrossFire performance mostly – but what was most interesting to us was how the battle between the GeForce GTX 260+ 896MB and Radeon HD 4870 1GB has really started to hot up. It's no longer quite as clear as it once was – the two trade blows at pretty regular intervals and each have their favourite titles. What's more, they're both fairly evenly priced too – the cheapest GTX 260+ we've found is £203.49 (inc. VAT), while the cheapest Radeon HD 4870 1GB falls just under £195 (inc. VAT).


One title that Nvidia talked about a lot was Fallout 3, but it seems that ATI has done some serious driver work since Nvidia ran its own internal benchmarks – it's now pretty much dominated by the Radeon, especially at 8xAA, in a single card configuration. But then in SLI and CrossFire, Nvidia manages to claw back quite a lot of lost ground and turns a lost cause into a dead heat. That, again, is some pretty impressive driver work on Nvidia's part.

On the other hand, Call of Duty: World at War is a game where the Radeon falls behind by a significant margin – it's a complete turnaround from Fallout 3 and SLI scaling is consistently high in that title as well. You can't say the same for CrossFire, sadly, as not only is the scaling less than optimal, but the minimum frame rates take a turn for the worse as well.

Frankly, it's actually hard to separate the two in a single card configuration, because it's ultimately going to come down to which games you play and whether you plan to upgrade to CrossFire or SLI later down the line (on the proviso that you buy a board supporting SLI because not all do). There are strengths to both cards but neither has what I'd call a complete disaster along the way – overall, SLI looks to be the stronger option for the time being.

As for the other cards, the GeForce GTX 280 performs well and is mostly faster than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, but there are scenarios where it isn't. Frankly, for a card that costs a lot more, we find that hard to swallow. The GeForce GTX 260+, on the other hand, trades blows at a similar price point to the Radeon – it wins some by big margins and loses others by equally large margins but for the most part it is on even footing. We can accept that, but we cannot accept that a card which is over £100 more expensive to fall short of the mark.

It's also clear that the Radeon HD 4870 512MB is starting to lose its way a bit – the lack of memory is really crippling it in many scenarios and over time more and more games will start to make use of more than 512MB of memory. It was a good value card earlier in the year, but now there is no reason not to opt for the Radeon HD 4870 1GB if you've decided that red is your colour.

Finally, the 4870 X2 is the fastest card you can stick in a single PCI-Express slot, but it relies on CrossFire technology which means some games may not scale particularly well. There's also the fact that rumours of a response from Nvidia may be about to take the 4870 X2's title away from it. What's more, a pair of Radeon HD 4870 1GBs running in CrossFire generally ends up being faster for around the same price, depending on brand and where you shop.