Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. just came out and here I used the demo to test the performance of both cards. The demo has a built in benchmark where it does a flyby through the land. Again, all settings were set to the maximum and resolution was set at 1600x1200 for the tests.
The demo doesn't go into any decimal digits for showing frames per second but you can see the GeForce GTX 275 having a good lead over the Radeon HD 4870 OC card in this test.
Left 4 Dead is a game I constantly play almost every day. Settings were set at maximum with a resolution of 1600x1200 and I recorded a portion of the boat house final for the Death Toll campaign. Using the recorded demo, I played it back using the built in timedemo feature of the Source Engine.
Both cards performed pretty much the same here and multiple runs showed it to be on average with both cards providing good performance
Finally Mirror's Edge rounds out the test suite here. PhysX was turned off but everything else was maxed out with a resolution of 1600x1200. I ran through the flyby demo and used Fraps to record the results.
The GeForce GTX 275 card came out ahead time time around with a 3FPS lead over the Radeon HD 4870 OC.
From the battery of tests, you can see that the GeForce GTX 275 and the overclocked Radeon HD 4870 to Radeon HD 4890 specs trade off in a few games. Depending on the software you are running you'll either see one over take the other a little bit but there are some items such as Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. or the 3D Mark Vantage where the GeForce GTX 275 pulls away. As far straight performance goes one isn't dominant over the other as they both offer good performance. Now, what I do have is an overclocked card so having a true Radeon HD 4890 might be a little different but as I said, the Radeon HD 4870 was overclocked stabily to Radeon 4890 specifications so if that's any indication, I don't see either card being really dominant over the other when you take all games into account. With that said, I really liked how the card performed and at the price that it's set at, you're getting a good deal but that's not where it stops.
Now, where the value might come in though is the amount of CUDA apps available, PhysX, and the ambient occlusion driver feature that NVIDIA has. With those factored in, the GeForce GTX 275 does seem to have a little better value if you are going to be playing games or using utilities that support those. There are some cool CUDA apps out there though but they are all very multimedia heavy for now. I do do a lot of transcoding and fixing up of videos so right there the card has an added value to me. Also, I have a few extra NVIDIA cards that can be used to accelerate physics with PhysX games so again, the value of the GTX 275 raises slightly a little more in that I have the ability to trake advantage of the technology. Even without the extra card, you'll still be able to get PhysX boost with the single GeForce GTX 275 card. Right now, there aren't really that many ATI Stream nor is the Havok accelleration prominent in games but until then I have to give NVIDIA the edge here.
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