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  ATI Radeon HD4890 vs NVIDIA Geforce GTX275

  Roydon Cerejo, Apr 02, 2009 1845 hrs IST

  Two of the hottest graphics cards battle it out to a finish

  

Page 1 - Intro, ATI HD4890 Page 2 - Nvidia GTX275 Page 3 - The Contenders Page 4 - Testbench, 3DMark 06, Vantage Page 5 - Far Cry 2, Crysis Page 6 - World in Conflict, Quake 4 Page 7 - Unreal Tournament 3, Half-life 2 Page 8 - Power consumption Page 9 - Last Card Standing

It's D-day! The two biggest players in the graphics card industry have just launched their latest incarnations of their graphic cards, and who other than Techtree to give you the inside scoop on not one but both graphics cards. For those not in the loop, ATI has launched their HD4890 graphics card, while Nvidia has their GTX275 card. Both these cards have slight improvements over their predecessors, which we'll explore in a bit more detail. They don't offer anything new in terms of technology and seem like fillers for their line-up.

Today's comparison will concentrate solely on which chipset offers more performance rather than a brand comparison. This time, XFX and Zotac provided us their samples early on, which is why we could give you this comparison right away; kudos to them. Let's look at both the ATI and Nvidia line-ups to see where these cards fit in, and whether they were really needed in the first place.

ATI HD4890

 

 

The much-awaited RV790 chip is finally here, although there's really not much to cheer about since there is nothing new technology-wise. The most striking difference would be the core clock, which has been increased by a 100MHz, as well as the memory, which is bumped up slightly from the stock 3.6GB/s to 3.9GB/s. The rest pretty much remains the same with 55nm fabrication, 800 shaders, and 1GB of GDDDR5 memory. What's interesting is the idle power consumption, which is supposed to be 30% lower as compared to the HD4870; let's see if that's true.

Looking at ATI's line-up, there is a huge gap between the HD4870 (1GB) and the HD4870 X2. I think that the HD4890 will eventually replace the HD4870 1GB. When you think about it, it's not really filling the gap in the line-up, but instead it's just a slightly improved version of the existing card. Hey, if Nvidia can do that each time, I think we can excuse ATI this once.

 

Page 1 - Intro, ATI HD4890 Page 2 - Nvidia GTX275 Page 3 - The Contenders Page 4 - Testbench, 3DMark 06, Vantage Page 5 - Far Cry 2, Crysis Page 6 - World in Conflict, Quake 4 Page 7 - Unreal Tournament 3, Half-life 2 Page 8 - Power consumption Page 9 - Last Card Standing

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