NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216: Competition for the 4870
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on September 16, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
We tested seven games. AMD and NVIDIA split it, each winning three of them and virtually tied in the seventh. I hate to disappoint those looking for a one sided fight here, but this one is a wash. NVIDIA would want to point out that CUDA and PhysX are significant advantages that would put the Core 216 over the top but honestly there's no compelling application for either (much like the arguments for Havok and DirectX 10.1 from the AMD camp).
Our recommendation here is to first see if either card happens to run a game you care about better than the other, but if not then just buy whatever is cheaper. Today that would be the Radeon HD 4870, currently it's very tough to find stock-clocked Core 216s and those are priced above $300; even if we could find availability at $279, the 4870 is still cheaper. Until the price comes down, the Radeon HD 4870 still remains our pick at the $250 - $300 pricepoint. While NVIDIA has closed the performance gap, the part they used still maintains a price gap.
NVIDIA says they will have availability on the silicon but that only two manufacturers are going to have parts out of the gate on this, which does give us pause. If the GTX 260 had been originally released with 9 TPCs (216 SPs), then it would have been a better competitor to the Radeon HD 4870 and we wouldn't need this slight tweak of a readjusted part. It doesn't generally deliver near it's 12.5% maximum theoretical performance improvement, and really seems like its only a thinly attempt to win at a couple more benchmarks than usual.
Yes it does that, and yes the consumer does benefit even if the benefit is ever so slight. But what none of us benefit from is an over abundance of parts released at nearly the same price point with nearly the same name and nearly the same specs. NVIDIA really needs to stop this trend. ATI tried this a few generations ago, but thankfully (at least since the AMD merger) they seem to have cleaned up their act a bit. There is no reason to have a continuum of hardware with increasingly complex naming as the gaps between parts are filled in.
What we need is less confusion in the market place and a focus on fairly pricing competitive hardware. Trying to get around supply and demand by cluttering up the market with different parts that have similar names and slightly different pricing isn't a consumer friendly way to go.
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AnnonymousCoward - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - link
> 2560X1600 (which I may ask why? since these are not high-end parts?!?)Uhh yeah they are...the 216 is only the second-fastest card in the world. Plus, that ultra high resolution can help expose things like memory size, memory bandwidth, and less CPU influence.
helldrell666 - Friday, September 19, 2008 - link
The new 216gtx is obviously slower than the 4870.It loses against the 4870 in 4 out 0f 6 games at 2560 res. and 5 out of 6 games at 1920 res.At 2560 res. they should've used the 4870 with 1 GB version.
AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, September 20, 2008 - link
Looking at all the bar graphs in this review, the 216 beats the 4870 6 out of 10 times.strikeback03 - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - link
Because the difference between 96.8 and 111.2 is rather irrelevant? Both cards can rock those resolutions, so the difference might lise elsewhere in the test systems. Since they aren't reporting minimum frame rates, both of the above are well into the playable range.7Enigma - Friday, September 19, 2008 - link
Not to me it isn't. Those numbers today can be 1/2 tomorrow with the latest game. I'd love to see the % of people purchasing these cards with a monitor capable of the highest resolution benchmarked. I think 1% is a safe bet. That 1% benefits from the game summary while the remaining 99% of potential buyers with lower res monitors that fail to read the broken-line graph and instead just read the game summary are given bad/incomplete information.Trust me, I'm not saying Anand is conspiring to put the Nvidia card in a better light, just that the summary as it stands is very misleading.
Jedi2155 - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - link
Or maybe it is the lack of memory in the frame buffer for the 4870 that prevents it from scaling its performance all the way to 2560.I believe it is a very important fact that the 4870 is faster at the lower resolutions than the Core 216, this omission shows a lack of attention to detail on the summary :-/.
Jedi2155 - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - link
Or maybe it is the lack of memory in the frame buffer for the 4870 that prevents it from scaling its performance all the way to 2560.I believe it is a very important fact that the 4870 is faster at the lower resolutions than the Core 216, this omission shows a lack of attention to detail on the summary :-/.
Stupido - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - link
Few days ago I got my new 24'' monitor... So I'm curious and would like to know your opinion:Currently I own Asus 8800GTS 512 but want to move to Sapphire HD4780 1G... Is it worth doing so?
P.S.
I have Vista machine and mainly (90% of the time) is for gaming (TF2, COD4 & Crysis. But planning to buy FarCry2 and Crysis Warhead?)... It is a Q6600@2.4GHz (planning to OC) on Gigabyte P35-DS3R with 4GB DDR2-800.
AnnonymousCoward - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - link
GT200 gives very poor performance! It has double the transistors of the previous generation for marginal gains. The GX2, with the same total transistors as GT200, blows it away.Since the Geforce 256, every new series has basically doubled performance, but this trend stopped from 8 to 9, and again 9 to GT200. The 8800 GTX is nearly 2 years old, and is still in the same league.
CollectorZ - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - link
Perhaps if Nvidia spent a little less money on marketing defective 280s and got on with the 55nm parts....Post exam October 25 would be a nice time to replace my 8800GT....