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
PhysX in Sacred 2: There, but not tremendously valuable
The first title on the chopping block? Sacred 2.
This was Ben’s type of game. It’s a Diablo-style RPG. It’s got a Metacritic score of 71 out of 100, which indicates “mixed or average reviews”.
I let ben play Sacred 2 for a while, first with PhysX disabled and then with it enabled. His response after it was enabled? “The game feels a little choppier but I don’t really notice anything.”
Derek and I were hovering over his shoulder at times and eventually Derek pointed out the leaves blowing in the wind. “Did they do that before?”, Derek asked. “I didn’t even notice them”, was Ben’s reply.
Sacred 2 without GPU accelerated PhysX
Sacred 2 with GPU accelerated PhysX - It's more noticeable here than in the game itself
We left Ben alone for him to play for a while. His verdict mirrored ours. The GPU accelerated PhysX effects in Sacred 2 were hardly noticeable, and when they were, they didn’t really do anything for the game at all. To NVIDIA’s credit, a Diablo-style RPG isn’t really the best place for showing off GPU accelerated physics.
Ben wanted a different style of game, something more actiony. He needed explosions, perhaps that would convince him (and all of us) of the value of GPU-accelerated PhysX. We moved to the next game on the list.
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SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
LOL - antoher hidden red rooster bias uncovered...Umm... look, when there's a new ati card, there's no talking about crunching down on former ati cards - OK ? That just is NOT allowed.
" No mention of the death of the HD 4850X2 as the HD4890 trashes the power consumption, price, availability, speed and OC-ability "
Dude, not allowed !
PS- Don't mention how this card is going to smash the "4870" "profit" "flagship" - gee now just don't talk about it - don't mention it - look, there's no rooster crying in fps gaming, ok ?
Torquer350 - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
Props to ATi for delivering a very compelling product. I admit I've always been an Nvidia fan, and I'll generally forgive them a single generational performance loss to ATi, but I've recommended ATi products recently to friends due to their resurgent desirability.That being said, am I the only one who detects a subtle but distinct underlying disdain for Nvidia? So they tried to market the hell out of you - so what? They are trying to sell cards here. Why the surprise that sales and marketing people are trying to do exactly what they're paid to do? Congrats for being smart enough to see it for what it is, but jeers for making an issue of it as if its some kind of new tactic. Has AMD/ATi never done the same?
CUDA and PhysX are compelling, but I agree not a good reason to overcome a significant gap between Nvidia and ATi at a comparable price point. You clearly agree, but it seems like what little praise you offer is begrudging in the extreme.
Nvidia has definitely acted in bad form in a number of ways throughout this very lengthy generation of hardware. However, you guys are journalists and in my opinion should make a more concerted effort to leave the vitriol and sensationalism at the door, regardless of who it is that is being reviewed. That kind of emotional reaction, personal opinion, irritation, etc is better served for your blog posts than a review article.
Love the site, keep up the good work. Nobodys perfect.
SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
Yeah thanks for noticing, too. It been going on a long time. Notice how now, suddenly when ati doesn't have 2560 sewn up - it doesn't matter anymore ... LOLOf course the "brilliiantly unbiased" reviewers will claim they did a poll on monitor resolution useage, and therefore sudenyl came to their conclusion about $2,000.00 monitor users, when they tiddled and taddled for years about 10 bucks between framerates and nvidia ati - and chose ati for the 10 bucks difference.
Yep, 10 bucks matters, but $1,700.00 difference for a monitor doesn't matter until they take a poll. Now they didn't say it, but they will - wait it's coming...
Just like I kept pointing out when they raved about ati taking the 30" resolution and not much if anything else, that declaring it the winner wasn't right. Now of course, when ati isn't winning the 30 rez - yes, well, they finally caught on. No bias here ! Nothing to notice, pure professionalism, and hatred of cuda and physx for it's lack of ability to run on ati cards is fully justified, and should offer NO advantage to nvidia when making a purchase decision ! LOL
OMG ! they're like GONERZ man.
Dried - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
Best review so far. And nice cards BTW, they are both worth it, but i like the 4890 betterFunny thing is that GTX 275 > GTX 280.
But my guess is that GTX 280 benefits more from overclocking.
Arbie - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
Because of my PC's location I am concerned with idle power, and purchase based on that if other specs and price are even comparable. Peak power doesn't matter as long as it's within the capability of my 800W PSU.I bought an ATI HD4850 last year because it idled significantly lower than the 4870, and it would run everything in sight. A great card. The Nvidia GTX 260 and 280 had even better performance vs idle power ratios but were way too expensive at the time.
So I think Nvidia takes the laurels now with the GTX 275. 30W less (!) than the HD 4890 at idle, with essentially the same performance. If I were shopping now it would be a VERY easy choice.
I really hope ATI can get their idle power down too. They need to pay more attention to throttling back or downpowering circuits that aren't needed in 2D modes.
helldrell666 - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
Use the radeon bios editor to edit the 2d profile and then downclock your gpu frequencies.OCedHrt - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
The power consumption on the 4890 really interests me. While it uses more than 275 at idle, it uses less under load. Also, it is a significant drop from the 4870 which is a slower card.bobvodka - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
So, on the charge of drivers; I've gone from recently having a GT8800GTX 512Meg to a HD4870X2 2gig and if anything I've seen stability improvements between the two. Or to put it another way NV drivers were bluescreening my Vista install when I was doing nothing more than using my TV card and it was crashing in a DirectDraw DLL. Nice.Not to say AMD hasn't had issues; trying to use hardware acceleration with any bluray play back resulted in a bluescreen due to the gpu going into an infinite loop. Nice. Fortunately, unlike the DDraw error above, I could at least turn off hardware acceleration (and honestly, with an i7 it's not like I needed it).
So, stability wise it's a wash.
As for the memory usage complaints about CCC;
Unless it is running it is NOT taking up physical memory. Like many things in the windows world it might load something into the background but this is quickly paged out and doesn't live in ram. Even if it does living in ram for a short period of time being inactive it will be paged out as soon as memory presure requires it. The simple fact is unused ram is wasted ram; this is why I'm glad Vista uses 10gig of my 12 for cache when it isn't needed for anything else, it speeds up the system.
Cuda.. well, the idea is nice and I like the idea but as mentioned in the article unless you have cross vendor support it isn't as useful as it could be. OpenCL and, for games, DX11's compute shaders are going to make life intresting for both Cuda and AMD's option. I will say this much; I suspect you'll get better performance from NV, AMD and indeed Larrabee when it appears by going 'to the metal' with them but as with many things in the software world you have to trade something for speed.
Now, PhysX.. well, this one is even more fun (and I guess it effects Cuda as well to a degree). Right now, with Vista, you can't run more than one vendor's gfx card in your system at once due to how WDDM1.0 works; so it's AMD or NV and that's your choice. With Win7 however the rules change slight and you'll be able to run, with WDDM1.1 drivers, cards from both vendors at once. Right away this paints an intresting landscape for those intrested; if you want an AMD card but also want some PhysX hardware power than you'll be able to slide in a 'cheap' NV series card to use for that reason (or indeed if you have an old series 8 laying about use that if the driver supports it).
Of course, with Havoc going OpenCL and being free for games which retail for <$10 (iirc) this is probably going to be much of a muchness in the end, but it's an intresting idea at least.
SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
Except you can run 2 nvidia cards, one for gaming, the other for physx.... so red fanboys are sol."Right now, with Vista, you can't run more than one vendor's gfx card in your system at once due to how WDDM1.0 works; so it's AMD or NV and that's your choice. "
WRONG, it's TWO nvidia or just ONE ati. Hello - you knew it - but you didn't say it that way - makes ati look bad, and we just cannot have that here....
Rhino2 - Monday, April 13, 2009 - link
The hell are you talking about? Crossfire works in vista just fine.