HD4890 and GTX275 head-to-head

Well, I've been hard at it over the last couple of days benching away for your pleasure. We've had the HD4890 for a wee while now, and managed to get hold of the AMP! overclocked edition of the GTX275 this very afternoon. So we've put together here a few benchmarks and some intelligent opinion from me on our first impressions with both cards.

And here's what we're playing with:

Sapphire Radeon HD4890
Price £225
Chipset AMD
GPU RV790
GPU Clock 850MHz
Memory 1GB GDDR5
Memory Clock 975MHz
Memory Bus 256-bit

Zotac GTX275 AMP!
Price £253
Chipset NVIDIA
GPU GT200
GPU Clock 702MHz
Memory 896MB GDDR3
Memory Clock 1260MHz
Memory bus 448-bit

We started from a fresh install of Vista Ultimate 64 on our standard PCF test rig - a Gigabyte EX58-UD4P motherboard with a Core i7 920 @2.67Ghz. Slapped on top of that we're running 6GB of Corsair DDR3 @ 1066MHz, chugging away on an OCZ Apex series SSD.

Our first impressions of the 4890 aren't hugely favourable when you're comparing it like-for-like with a 1GB version of the original 4870. The Sapphire version we were benching with wasn't too far behind in the tests, at the most dropping 5fps, but is over £50 cheaper than it's younger sibling. That said though the 4890 is ripe for a bit of juicy overclocking, as you can see from the fattened capacitors sitting atop the new PCB. These should provide a more stable flow power on the card, and should enable the extensive headroom AMD is boasting of.

PCF tech guru, Jeremy Laird, has already had his running stably at 965MHz, which should garner you a healthy bonus in frame rates. My concern here though is in my experience with the overclocked 4870x2s on the AMD stock coolers. These cards were hardly capable of coping with the extra heat generated and I'm worried that maybe pushing the chip as far as it can go will damage it in the long term without a replacement, after-market cooler.

The GTX275 has proved to be a bit of an overclocking daemon too, with Zotac releasing its AMP! edition with a fairly chunky 71MHz overclock on the GPU out of the stocks. We'll report back on our efforts to push it further soon...

But how do they perform against each other?

Well, for a starter the factory overclocked card is inevitably above NVIDIA's touted £199 pricepoint for the GTX275, making it over £25 more expensive thatn the 4890; and realistically you're not actually getting that much more performance out of it compared to the AMD card. Again, you're looking at around a 5fps increase with the GTX275. Although AMD-favourite GRID is still showing its bias in the head-to-head with the 4890 nosing ahead in that one.

What's really interesting about the GTX275 though is that with this overclocked edition it shows that its more than a match for the GTX285, a card that is around £100 more. So with this card NVIDIA has essentially put out to pasture its top-of-the-range single-GPU card. It's only in Far Cry 2 and the lower resolution echelons of GRID that the GTX285's extra memory and superior bus width really show.

Between the AMD and NVIDIA cards though it really is too close to call. In WiC the GTX275 shows the slight advantage you get from the extra £25 you're paying for the AMP! edition, though realistically you ought to be able to match Zotac's overclock with a standard model that's another £25 cheaper than the 4890.

So then, where do you put your money? I would have to say that on this one I'd personally plump for the NVIDIA option. Finally the extra, value-added features of the GT200 chips, such as CUDA and PhysX, come into play. They're practically equal on performance, and on price, so it's now that the R&D money the green side put in really comes into play.

The real fly in the ointment though is the GTX260. These are powerful cards, running the same GPU, that you can pick up for around £160 now - £190 if you go for the overclocked edition of that card which will garner very close figures compared to the GTX275. The newer NVIDIA card will probably go higher than the GTX260 can manage in terms of headroom, but if you're already sporting the mid-range NVIDIA card there really is no benefit in upgrading at all unless you want to go for either camp's multi-GPU cards.

But if it was just a choice between the HD4890 and the GTX275 from a fresh start it would have to be the green card. The AMD GPU is the far more elegant solution in terms of chip architecture, but the brute force power of the NVIDIA chip and its added extras give it the win.
Dave James