It's tough to not also talk about the other things NVIDIA brings forth when reviewing one of their cards. PhysX is getting more and more prominent and NVIDIA cards like the GeForce GTX 275 will offer hardware acceleration in games that support this feature. Now having a single card to do 3D and PhysX can be a little taxing so if you do have a spare NVIDIA GeForce 8 series and up card around, you can pop it in and have that card handle the PhysX acceleration for you freeing up your main video card to handle the grunt work of 3D video. I'm going to hold off on the PhysX performance and features for a future article when I have more time to spend with a few configurations but from my previous review of the GeForce GTS 250, I really liked what I saw and it added a lot of nice visual effects. A new Sacred 2 patch was just recently released adding PhysX features so if you have the game and a GeForce 88XX GTX card and up you might want to pick up the patch to see some added spell and environmental effects.
Finally, as a programmer I love things like CUDA. CUDA can turn your graphics card into a high powered processing general purpose multi-cored CPU. For programs that have a lot of parallel processing needs, CUDA can really help speed things up. There are a few video-centric applications that utilize CUDA to help speed up transcoding or media processing times using the GeForce GTX 275 card to do all the heavy grunt work and freeing up the computer's CPU. So, you can theoretically use your GeForce GTX 275 with the supported application to transcode a large media file into another format and still have enough CPU cycles to do other work such as browsing the web, word processing, or answering email. Not only does CUDA enabled applications free up your CPU but they can also perform tasks a lot faster because of the multiple processing cores on the card. I'm going to be adding a news item showing off some of the cool effects you can achieve with a program called vReveal which takes advantage of CUDA soon so be sure to look for that.
Tests were done with the 185.63 drivers from NVIDIA. We pitted the card against Radeon HD 4870 with 1MB on board overclocked to Radeon HD 4890 specifications of 850MHz GPU and 975MHz memory because we didn't have a Radeon card on hand at this time. Catalyst 9.3 drivers were used with the AMD card. Right now, NVIDIA has a little bit newer versions of their drivers out but compared to what was tested, there are some minor changes that won't affect any of the tests.
The test system includes:
Intel Q6700 Quad Core
4GB of ram
Vista Ultimate 64-bit
ECS PN2 SLI2+ motherboard
First up is the synthetic benchmark 3DMark Vantage. Settings were set at default for the test and the resolution was set at 1280x1024.
For GPU score, the GeForce GTX 275 has a lead over the overclocked Radeon HD 4870.
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