ATI Radeon HD 4890 vs. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on April 2, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Putting this PhysX Business to Rest
Let me put things in perspective. Remember our Radeon HD 4870/4850 article that went up last year? It was a straight crown-robbing on ATI’s part, NVIDIA had no competitively priced response at the time.
About two hours before the NDA lifted on the Radeon HD 4800 series we got an urgent call from NVIDIA. The purpose of the call? To attempt to persuade us to weigh PhysX and CUDA support as major benefits of GeForce GPUs. A performance win by ATI shouldn’t matter, ATI can’t accelerate PhysX in hardware and can’t run CUDA applications.
The argument NVIDIA gave us was preposterous. The global economy was weakening and NVIDIA cautioned us against recommending a card that in 12 months would not be the right choice because new titles supporting PhysX and new CUDA applications would be coming right around the corner.
The tactics didn’t work obviously, and history showed us that despite NVIDIA’s doomsday warnings - Radeon HD 4800 series owners didn’t live to regret their purchases. Yes, the global economy did take a turn for the worst, but no - NVIDIA’s PhysX and CUDA support hadn’t done anything to incite buyer’s remorse for anyone who has purchased a 4800 series card. The only thing those users got were higher frame rates. (Note that if you did buy a Radeon HD 4870/4850 and severely regretted your purchase due to a lack of PhysX/CUDA support, please post in the comments).
This wasn’t a one time thing. NVIDIA has delivered the same tired message at every single opportunity. NVIDIA’s latest attempt was to punish those reviewers who haven’t been sold on the PhysX/CUDA messages by not sending them GeForce GTS 250 cards for review. The plan seemed to backfire thanks to one vigilant Inquirer reporter.
More recently we had our briefing for the GeForce GTX 275. The presentation for the briefing was 53 slides long, now the length wasn’t bothersome, but let’s look at the content of the slides:
| Slides About... | Number of Slides in NVIDIA's GTX 275 Presentation |
| The GeForce GTX 275 | 8 |
| PhysX/CUDA | 34 |
| Miscellaneous (DX11, Title Slides, etc...) | 11 |
You could argue that NVIDIA truly believes that PhysX and CUDA support are the strongest features of its GPUs. You could also argue that NVIDIA is trying to justify a premium for its much larger GPUs rather than having to sell them as cheap as possible to stand up to an unusually competitive ATI.
NVIDIA’s stance is that when you buy a GeForce GPU, it’s more than just how well it runs games. It’s about everything else you can run on it, whether that means in-game GPU accelerated PhysX or CUDA applications.
Maybe we’ve been wrong this entire time. Maybe instead of just presenting you with bar charts of which GPU is faster we should be penalizing ATI GPUs for not being able to run CUDA code or accelerate PhysX. Self reflection is a very important human trait, let’s see if NVIDIA is truly right about the value of PhysX and CUDA today.
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san1s - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
why didn't you post a page on how useless dx 10.1 is? I bet that there will be even less difference in gameplay with dx10.1 on compared to dx10 than physxAnandThenMan - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
10.1 can bring some meaningful performance boosts.http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/1757/hd489064.jpg">http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/1757/hd489064.jpg
SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
ati can't do physx at all - so uhh, no performance boost there, EVER.Same with cuda.
Kinda likewise with this cool Vreveal clean up video thingie.
Same with the badaboom converter compared to ati's err(non mentioned terrible implementation)...lol hush hush!!! doesn't matter ! doesn't matter ! nothing going on there !
tamalero - Thursday, April 9, 2009 - link
hu, gpu phsyx gpu aceleration only helps when theres heavy physx caltulations.almost no game uses that heavy calculations nowadays.
besides, if you wanted physix to run, dont you need a second card to run physX while the other does the graphics?
I suspect thers a slowdown as well if the same graphic card does the work.
SiliconDoc - Friday, April 24, 2009 - link
Since you suspect there's a slowdown with PhysX enabled it points out two things to me : 1. you have no clue if there is because you don't have an nvidia card, indicating your red rooster issue.2. That's why you didn't get my point when the other poster linked to the other review and listed the various settings and I laughed while pointing out the NV said PhysX enabled.
_______
It's funny how your brain farts at just the wrong time, and you expose your massive experience weakness:
"you suspect" - you don't know.
Go whine at someone else, or don't at all. At least bring a peashooter to the gunfight.
Ever played War Monger or Mirror's Edge ? lol
No of course not! YOU CAN'T, until, you know.
yacoub - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
Given that you label the price for the GTX260-216 as $205, and in reality it's closer to $175, can we expect the 275 will be closer to $215 in short order?yacoub - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
Of course ATi has a hard launch of this product - its hardware appears from your description to be identical to existing hardware just with a slight clockspeed boost, where as the GTX-275 is actually a break between the 285 and the 260.Also the 275 is much more appealing given that it has actual hardware improvements over the 260 for just a bit more cash.
chrnochime - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
Did you actually bothered to read other comments wrt the fact that the RV790 is a respin, not just bump in gpu/mem clkspeed??And the actual hardware improvements that are just cut-down from the GTX295. Big deal. Appealing to the NV fanboys, sure.
7Enigma - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
It's possible he saw the article before Anand/Gary corrected the table. Originally the table had identical numbers between the 4870 and 4890. And in the text they mentioned that it was basically an OC'd 4870. This could lead one to assume it was pretty much the same card. In the article (on the next page) they did mention quickly the high transistor count, but it was brushed over quickly and they didn't really go into detail about the differences (still waiting to get a response about the cooling solution changes).As for the rest of his post, he IS clearly an Nvidia fanboy, because the 4890 is clearly the better product in just about every case (not even looking at the OC'ing potential which seems to be very nice).
SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
Hmm, better in every case, without the overclocking potential ? lol He's a fanboy ?Is it better with Cuda, curing cancer with Folding, Vreveal clean up video recoding, forced game profiles, dual GPU game forcing ? Any of those have an as good equivalent ? NO NOT ONE.
So you know dude, he's not the fanboy...
The thing is, ati did a good job with the ring around the gpu 3m transistors to cut down frazzly electric - and gain a good overclock.
That they did well. They also added capacitors and voltage management to the card - an expense left - not mentioned in expense terms - including the larger die cost.
So, on the one hand we have a rebranded overclock that merely used the same type of core reworking that goes into a shrink, but optimized for clocks with a transistor band around the outside.
Not a core rework, but a very good refinement.
I knew the intricacies would be wailed about by the red fans, but not a one is going to note that the G80 is NOT the same as the G92b - the refinements happened there as well in the die shrink, and in between, just like they do on cpu revisions.
Since ATI was making and overclocking upgrade, they needed to ring the core - and make whatever rearrangements were neccessary to do that.
Purely rebrand ? Ahh, not really, but downclocking it to the old numbers may (likely) reveal it's identical anyway.
At that point rebrand is tough to get away from, since the nvidia rebrands offered core revision and memory/clock differences, as well.
I'll give ati a very slight edge because of the ring capacitors, which is interesting, and may be due to the ddr5, that made their core viable for competition to begin with, instead of just a 9800X equivalent, the 4850 - minus the extra capabilities - cuda, better folding, physx, forced sli, game profiles - etc... vreveal... and on and on - evga game drivers on release day - etc. - oh the uhh.. ambient occlusion and fear + many other game mods for it...
Anyway, tell me none of that matters with a straight face - and that face will be so red you'll have to pay in wampum at the puter store.