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ATI, Nvidia Reveal New $250 Graphics Cards
ThinSkin writes "As part of their 'Spring Refresh,' both AMD and Nvidia reveal new $250 graphics cards, the Radeon 4890 and GeForce GTX 275. ExtremeTech takes both cards and runs them through a gamut of gaming and synthetic benchmarks to decide which card triumphs over the other. Long story short, the GeForce takes the cake with impressive performance at its price, while the Radeon didn't show a high improvement over the cheaper Radeon 4870."
Yet HotHarware tests their 4890 and shows that it outperforms the 4870 in every category...
http://hothardware.com/Articles/ATI-Radeon-HD-4890-RV790-Unveiled/
and I quote:
"In every test, the Radeon HD 4890 (Asus EAH4890) was faster than the 1GB Radeon HD 4870, and the overclocked 4890 (Asus EAH4890 TOP) simply increased the card's overall lead. In comparison to competing offerings from NVIDIA, the Radeon HD 4890 is faster than the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 overall, but it didn't quite keep pace with the just announced GeForce GTX 275."
The Inquirer (I know, they hate nVidia with a passion) is speculating that the GT275 may be a relabeled GT260, except for reviewer cards which may be relabeled GT280's: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/599/1051599/nvidia-hoodwinks-reviewers-mythical-gt275s
I guess this is common for ATI/AMD and nVidia to do, but it's the first I've heard of it and it seems awful slimy.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
This might be useful to someone like me, Phoronix just reviewed the 4890 on Linux with the ATI catalyst drivers: :)
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_radeon_hd4890&num=1
Hardware site 1 disagrees with hardware site 2! Who can we trust!
Nothing in the linked article or the other various reviews of the two cards I've seen today concludes "the Radeon didn't show a high improvement over the cheaper Radeon 4870."
I'm not sure on how to analyze that post after reading TFA. It seems that the radeon beat the nvidia in most of the cases, even at the $ per average FPS..
Thus why is this tagged with nvidia as the winner ?
Looking at a wider range of reviews, I think we can call this round a draw. That means the real winners are consumers, because the selling point will become price.
Or, if you read the most interesting review of these cards, you'll see why maybe nvidia will skip the price game this time and instead try (and fail) to sell their cards based on physx:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3539
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
yea...but don't think it's a "they"...just one crusader (don't think he wears a cape): Charlie Demerjian
He just hates nVidia with a passion.
Supposedly, there was some sort of "tiff" between them...them, like many companies, wanting to limit negative reviews, etc.
either way, grains (not just grain) of salt required for his articles regarding NV.
The cake is a lie. You keep the cake.
Kind of a useless test from my point of view, that of someone that would be looking to upgrade, for one simple reason.
These comparisons never seem to include the last generation of cards, and thus of no real value to me since I cannot determine how much of an upgrade I would be getting.
I don't care how many fucking cores it has if it doesn't perform better then what I have right now.
Benchmark testing my own machine(as a comparison tool) is sort of useless as well since the REST of my machine may be totally different then what they used.
Which is better then which is an entirely moot point if neither is better then what I have.
$250.00. That's more than half of what I paid for my entire system new. The cost of a new system seems to be heavily based on the graphics/monitor. Used to be RAM and disk.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Every time new video cards are released, you have all these different comparison tests, by various sites, and they come up with the same thing: It depends. Depends on the rest of the hardware in the system, it depends on what your application is, depends on the cycle of the moon, depends on the cycle of the locust. What we have here is more useless results. Out of all the components in the PC, it seems like the video card is the most subjective part. It almost makes me want to give up PC gaming forever and just deal with the onboard video.
Check out GPUReview's video card compare and see what the theoretical performance differences are:
http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php
It does appear that the just announced cards aren't listed on that site yet to compare against unfortunately.
This space is not for rent.
The 275 is something of a "cross" between a 260 and 280. The 280 has 240 shader cores, 1GB of RAM and a 512-bit memory bus. The 260 has 192 or 216 cores depending on the version 896MB of memory and a 448-bit memory bus. They are both 65nm parts. Well the 275 is a 55nm part and nVidia's spec page says it has 240 shader cores, 896MB of memory and a 448-bit memory bus. Hence like I said, a cross between the old two.
Ok well that leave one of two situations for the Inquirer conspiracy theory:
1) nVidia is giving the reviewers cards with more RAM. Possible, but not likley. Also, wouldn't give significantly better results. Turns out that much RAM isn't useful for games these days.
2) nVidia is lying on their product spec page. They are sending 240sp versions to reviewers, and 192 or 216 core versions to the public. Very unlikely, they'd get sued for false advertising.
I just don't buy it. I suppose in theory they could do something like increase the clocks on review cards, but that is real likley to get noticed. Those reviewers know how to run utilities like GPU-Z as well as the rest of us.
I am starting to think nVidia needs to sue Charlie Demerjian for libel. There's not much question his intent is malicious, and he certainly puts out false information. His only defense would be that he didn't know it was false and of course that brings up the question as to why he didn't check, being a journalist and all.
I'll believe this if someone has some kind of real proof, but this seems totally unsubstantiated.
I thought price fixing was illegal in the US. I'm curious as to how the two top competitors manage to release "new" products at the same time and for roughly the same price (within $50 of each other)...
Ohhh wait, must be that "free" market at work again?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Thanks to EVGA I got a 260 not long ago, and just got notice I could upgrade to the 275 for the cost of shipping, since the 260 is already doing massivly well (running almost every game at max settings) the 5 bucks for shipping is a real nice deal for once.
This is not an add for EVGA, i dont work for them, I just thought it was kinda cool that for once, my video card isent outdated (and unsellable) from the getgo
Since the world is slowly (rapidly?) moving towards the lap/notebook this market surely can't be a growth one.
i.e. in my house I've moved all my kids computers (4), mine, and the wife's to laptops. Oh, and my low power home server broke so I switched it to EEE701 since the 20MB/sec it cranks out is more than sufficient for the G/N network.
That, and none of the new chips they're bring out seem to be much better than renamed versions of the old ones. My "old" 7900GTX has about the same performance as the 9600 I've got in my MBP...
When ATI released the 48x0 cards, their top of the line, they had something like 80% of the performance as the top nvidia cards and cost 1/2 as much.
Prices on cards are dropping.
And as others have stated its a price point.
I'm not sure about nVidia, but ATI has (for a while now) offered "X2" versions of its high-end cards, with two GPUs connected via integrated CrossFire (like SLI). These cards are more expensive, to be sure, but last time I checked the 4870 X2 was the best single card available.
Presumably the 4890 is also available with two GPUs? How about the 275?
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The problem is you are comparing a very high end graphics card to the price of a very low end system. These two cards aren't quite the highest end offered, but they are up there. These are the serious gamer type cards. We are talking "All details up, high rez, fast frame rate," things. Thus they are targeted at higher end systems.
A $500 system is very low end. Nothing wrong with that, just recognize that. Now that means that all the components are thus lower performance. In a system of that price, probably somewhere in the realm of $5-20 is going towards video. It is most likely an integrated video processor of some kind.
While graphics are a major cost in high end systems, they certainly aren't half. My graphics card was like $400 new, but then my processor was like $250, soundcard was $200, and so on.
A $250 graphic card is the thing you'll find in $1200+ computers, not in $500 computers. There's room in the market for both.
For years I used the ATI Rage Pro 128 MB AGP card in all my computers, because it worked reliably with all linuxes and other OS's and was cheap, and performance was more than good enough. At one point I bought 15 of the cards for $3 each on ebay, and used them one by one in various servers and desktops.
Now, most of the motherboards have PCI Express slots in them. I would like to use ATI cards with all open-source drivers. What is the equivalent card I should be purchasing ?
Just judging by the FPS tests, the 4890 beats the 275 most of the time. This is what matters the most to most gamers. So how can you call this a "win" for nVidia?
So I'm curious, what do you get on today's systems that makes it worthwhile to pay $200 for a sound card?
I had the feeling it was no longer for wavetable, nor for number of bits of d-to-a conversion. Is it 7.1 surround, or what?
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
Make a $400 card that will do everything (max settings, full AA&AF), a $200 card that will do everything on an average-sized monitor, and $50 for everything else. There are way too many card models out there.
Hmmm, I read the article and paid great attention to the benchmarks. 4890 tends to score better.
Here, read the FPS results for yourself all run by Extreme Tech at 1900x1200 (from about 22" to 27" monitors).
card noAA/4xAA
crysis
275 24/19
4890 24/21
far cry 2
275 68/56
4890 79/56
l4d
275 125/105
4890 126/95
COD5 World in Conflict
275 61/40
4890 56/38
Company of Heroes
275 99/84
4890 69/60
Supreme Commander
275 66/64
4890 68/63
Hawx
275 71/43
4890 61/54
Stormrise
275 29/28
4890 47/42
Stalker Clear Sky
275 50/23
4890 48/23
OCUK Price of 275 229.99 GBP inc VAT
4890 209.99 GBP inc VAT
So to say the 275 takes the cake is rather a strange view.
Nvidia and AMD are both very savvy and big organisations. They have products aimed at all market sectors now. From budget gamers to bleeding edge competition sponsored gamers.
TBO, to choose a graphics card today, you have to know which games you play. Cos both Nvidia and AMD have roughly equivilant cards for the performance and the budget. Yup, it's that close a race!
The other factors you have to consider are
Chosen output? (pretty much determined by your optimal flat panel resolution these days!). No point looking at 24" panel resolution results (1900x1200) when all you have is a 19" (1280x1024)
How pretty you like it? Note the two values above. The second value is lower as it uses AA at varying levels. Think of it like putting the roof down on a convertible car. Car looks and feels great, but the performance hit is quite noticable.
Similarly to cars, some ppl can't live without that AA feature turned on (along with AF too!). So when comparing the numbers, find out if those features are essential to you.
NB: DO NOT USE THE ONBOARD GRAPHICS RAM AMOUNT AS AN INDICATOR! The graphics card manufacturers these days have cottoned onto that one. It's a bit like having 16 valves on a ford fiesta 1.1L. it'll improve it but in the end it's still a tiny 1.1 litre engine. Similarly with graphics cards.
Now I'm not espousing Tomshardware, but this page is the only one with a complete hierarchy that i've found that shows a rough relative performance with older cards too, so you can really see whether it's worth an upgrade.
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/geforce-gtx-radeon,review-31515-6.html
Also has some mobile graphics cards listed too, so you can see what portability is costing you performance and price wise!
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ok im not seeing how the 275 "takes the cake". the benchmarks all show the 4890 beating it in game...AND with less power consumption and a lot less heat...and the 275 is 10$ more. and thats b4 rebates :P lol as far as i can see...the 4980 took the cake...and ate it too :P