Worse still, the GTX 275 is either as fast or faster than the Radeon HD 4890 in every game we've tested with, and at folding. Meanwhile, Nvidia has merely tweaked the GT200 design and shoved it into the market at a very aggressive price. But these tweaks have produced a hot and loud card. To get more speed from its RV770 (HD 4870) GPU, it's had to stretch the design to allow the use of fatter copper interconnects to help maintain signal integrity and place more silicon between transistors to keep power leakage down as it raises the clock speed. As usual, ATI's folding performance didn't match that of the Nvidia cards and the horrendous noise that the HD 4890 made when folding means that even casual folders running the client in the background while working or web browsing should look elsewhere for their graphics card.īoth cards proved very overclockable, even if our sample HD 4890 didn't manage the 1GHz GPU frequency that ATI claimed it should Sapphire is currently finalising a Vapor-X cooler for the Radeon HD 4890, which could help matters and we hope to see some other custom cooler cards to see what a 1GHz GPU can achieve.įinal Thoughts.All of the above presents a problem for ATI. That the HD 4890 is also noticeably louder than the GTX 275 when either card is idle, under load, or folding (especially when folding, where the HD 4890 cooler does a great impression of a hair-dryer) also counts against it. The frankly rubbish Call of Duty: World at War also favours the Nvidia hardware, with the GTX 275 ahead by a few fps at every resolution. In DX9 mode, the GTX 275 is faster than the HD 4890 at every resolution too. In games such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, Fallout 3 and Race Driver: GRID the two cards are fairly evenly matched, with the HD 4890 only slightly ahead in latter two games.Ĭrysis in DX10 mode clearly favours the GTX 275 to the tune of a few extra fps, while the HD 4890 can't handle the AA of Far Cry 2 in DX10/10.1 mode. Very rarely does one card soundly beat the other to such a degree that you'd have to dial down AA, resolution or detail settings if you chose one over the other.
#Radeon hd 6670 vs nvidia geforce gtx 275 driver
This is because, despite Nvidia's driver download site, the newer release 185 beta driver is Nvidia's preferred driver.ĬonclusionsThe performance offered by ATI's Radeon HD 4890 and Nvidia's GeForce GTX 275 is actually fairly similar. We also want to make clear that the following conclusions will be based on the ForceWare 185.65 beta driver performance figures for the GTX 275 rather than the ForceWare 182.50. VAT - this seems to be freakishly low price for only one manufacturer, so we're placing it one side. This is despite Novatech having a stock-speed PowerColor HD 4890 for £209.99 inc. VAT, so the following comparisons will be entirely about performance. Meanwhile, HD 4890 cards also cost roughly £220 inc. This means that we'll be using a price of £220 inc. As the changes that Palit has made will certainly affect the power consumption, noise and thermal performance - and possibly the performance - of the GTX 275, we can only use a price for a partner-branded reference card with the data we have collected. VAT, this card sports a custom cooler and possibly other departures from the reference design that we tested. While Scan does have a Palit GeForce GTX 275 for £199.99 inc. Evaluation criteriaBefore delving into performance figures and so forth, we want to re-establish the prices we're using for this comparison.