ATI Radeon HD4890 vs NVIDIA Geforce GTX275

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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

Expert Review

Nvidia GTX275

Nvidia was supposed to launch this card much later, but at the last moment decided to pull the launch forward to - well, you guessed it, 2 April. I guess the thought of another blockbuster from ATI really scared them, and it also makes great fodder for an article for guys like us, so everyone wins.

Looks familiar? That's because the GTX275 is essentially a single PCB (and core) GTX295. If you remember, the GTX295 is a dual GPU, dual PCB card pre-configured in SLI. The GTX275 has exactly the same specifications as the GTX295, with 240 shaders and 896MB of GDDR3 memory running on a 448-bit memory bus. It's actually a very interesting card. I mean, think about it, you have the 240 cores of the GTX280; couple it with the stripped down memory bus of the GTX260, and you have a powerful graphics card in the 17-18K range. The GTX260 (216 shaders) anyways retails for around 17K and shares the same features; when we buy the GTX275, we get the full shader count of 240 for just a little more, making it more attractive.

Two things may happen, either the GTX275 may eat into the sales of the GTX260 (216 shaders), or Nvidia will drop the price further and chuck out the old 65nm GTX260 (192 shaders).

Now that we know what lies ahead, let take a closer look at the two offerings, the XFX HD4890 and the Zotac GTX275.