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
Mirror’s Edge: Do we have a winner?
And now we get to the final test. Something truly different: Mirror’s Edge.
This is an EA game. Ben had to leave before we got to this part of the test, he does have a wife and kid after all, so I went at this one alone.
I’d never played Mirror’s Edge. I’d seen the videos, it looked interesting. You play as a girl, Faith, a runner. You run across rooftops, through buildings, it’s all very parkour-like. You’re often being pursued by “blues”, police offers, as you run through the game. I won’t give away any plot details here but this game, I liked.
The GPU accelerated PhysX impacted things like how glass shatters and the presence of destructible cloth. We posted a video of what the game looks like with NVIDIA GPU accelerated PhysX enabled late last year:
"Here is the side by side video showing better what DICE has added to Mirror's Edge for the PC with PhysX. Please note that the makers of the video (not us) slowed down the game during some effects to better show them off. The slow downs are not performance related issues. Also, the video is best viewed in full screen mode (the button in the bottom right corner)."
In Derek’s blog about the game he said the following:
“We still want to really get our hands on the game to see if it feels worth it, but from this video, we can at least say that there is more positive visual impact in Mirror's Edge than any major title that has used PhysX to date. NVIDIA is really trying to get developers to build something compelling out of PhysX, and Mirror's Edge has potential. We are anxious to see if the follow through is there.”
Well, we have had our hands on the game and I’ve played it quite a bit. I started with PhysX enabled. I was looking for the SSD-effect. I wanted to play with it on then take it away and see if I missed it. I played through the first couple of chapters with PhysX enabled, fell in lust with the game and then turned off PhysX.
I missed it.
I actually missed it. What did it for me was the way the glass shattered. When I was being pursued by blues and they were firing at me as I ran through a hallway full of windows, the hardware accelerated PhysX version was more believable. I felt more like I was in a movie than in a video game. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t hyper realistic, but the effect was noticeable.
I replayed a couple of chapters and then played some new ones with PhysX disabled now before turning it back on and repeating the test.
The impact of GPU accelerated PhysX was noticeable. EA had done it right.
The Verdict?
So am I sold? Would I gladly choose a slower NVIDIA part because of PhysX support? Of course not.
The reason why I enjoyed GPU accelerated PhysX in Mirror’s Edge was because it’s a good game to begin with. The implementation is subtle, but it augments an already visually interesting title. It makes the gameplay experience slightly more engrossing.
It’s a nice bonus if I already own a NVIDIA GPU, it’s not a reason for buying one.
The fact of the matter is that Mirror’s Edge should be the bare minimum requirement for GPU accelerated PhysX in games. The game has to be good to begin with and the effects should be the cherry on top. Crappy titles and gimmicky physics aren’t going to convince anyone. Aggressive marketing on top of that is merely going to push people like us to call GPU accelerated PhysX out for what it is. I can’t even call the overall implementations I’ve seen in games half baked, the oven isn’t even preheated yet. Mirror’s Edge so far is an outlier. You can pick a string of cheese off of a casserole and like it, but without some serious time in the oven it’s not going to be a good meal.
Then there’s the OpenCL argument. NVIDIA won’t port PhysX to OpenCL, at least not anytime soon. But Havok is being ported to OpenCL, that means by the end of this year all games that use OpenCL Havok can use GPU accelerated physics on any OpenCL compliant video card (NVIDIA, ATI and Intel when Larrabee comes out).
While I do believe that NVIDIA and EA were on to something with the implementation of PhysX in Mirror’s Edge, I do not believe NVIDIA is strong enough to drive the entire market on its own. Cross platform APIs like OpenCL will be the future of GPU accelerated physics, they have to be, simply because NVIDIA isn’t the only game in town. The majority of PhysX titles aren’t accelerated on NVIDIA GPUs, I would suspect that it won’t take too long for OpenCL accelerated Havok titles to equal that number once it’s ready.
Until we get a standard for GPU accelerated physics that all GPU vendors can use or until NVIDIA can somehow convince every major game developer to include compelling features that will only be accelerated on NVIDIA hardware, hardware PhysX will be nothing more than fancy lettering on a cake.
You wanted us to look at PhysX in a review of an ATI GPU, and there you have it.
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SiliconDoc - Friday, April 24, 2009 - link
You failed to read his post, and therefore the context of my response, you IDIOT.Can you run a second ATI card for PhysX - NO.
Can you run an ati card and a second NV for PhysX - not without a driver hack - check techpowerup for the how to and files, as I've already mentioned.
So, THAT'S WHAT WE WE'RE TALKING ABOUT DUMMY.
Now you can take your stupidity along with you, noone can stop it.
pizzimp - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
From an objective point of view there is not really a clear winner. At the lower resolutions do you really care if you are getting 80 FPS Vs 100 FPS?IMO it is the higher resolutions that matter. I would think any real gamer is always looking to upgrade there monitor :).
I wonder how old you guys are that are posting? Who cares if something is "rebadged" or just an OC version of something? Bottom line is how does the card play the game?
IMO both cards are good. It comes down to price for me.
SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
Ahh, you just have to pretend framerates you can't see or notice, and only the top rate or the average, never the bottom framerate...Then you must discount ALL the OTHER NVIDIA advantages, from cuda, to badaboom, to better folding scores, to physx, to game release day evga drivers ready to go, to forced game profiles in nvidia panel none for ati - and on and on and on...
Now, after 6 months of these red roosters screaming ati wins it all because it had the top resolution of the 30" monitor sewed up and lost in lower resolutions, these red roosters have done a 180 degree about face.... now the top resolution just doesn't matter -
Dude, the red ragers are lying loons, it's that simple.
The 2 year old 9800X core is the 4870 without ddr5. Think about that, and how deranged they truly are.
I bet they have been fervently praying to their red god hoping that change doesn't come in the form of ddr5 on that old g80/g92/g92b core - because then instead of it competing with the 4850 - it would be a 4870 - and THAT would be an embarrassment - a severe embarrassment. The crowing of the red roosters would diminish... and they'ed be bent over sucking up barnyard dirt and chickseed - for a long, long time. lol
Oh well, at least ati might get 2 billion from Obama to cover it's losses ... it's sad when a red rooster card could really use a bailout, isn't it ?
helldrell666 - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
Well, you have a point there. But the card is still not operating on a WHQL driver, and the percentage of those who use 30" montiors is negligible compared to the owners of 22" / 24" monitors.I think this is probably due to the 256bit internal memory interface compared to the 484bit that the gtx275 has.even at xbitlabs the 4890 drops significantly in performance compared to the gtx285.
7Enigma - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
From a subjective point of view you may feel that way, but from an objective point of view there is a clear winner, and it is the 4890. Left for Dead and Call of Duty are the only 2 30" display tests where the 275 significantly defeated the 4890. In all of the other tests either the 4890 either dominated (G.R.I.D., Fallout3), or was within 4% of the 275 which I would call a wash. At all other resolutions the 4890 was the undisputed leader. So I find it difficult to say there is no clear winner.What Nvidia should have done was not nerfed their 22" and 24" resolutions for the very few people that game at 30" with the latest drivers. To be honest I wish the article had included all of the results from the 182 drivers (they show just G.R.I.D. but allude to other games also having similar reduced results except at the highest res). It could very likely be a wash then if the 275 is more competetive at the resolutions 99% of the people buying this level/price of card are going to be playing at.
Anand, any way you could post, even just in the comments, the numbers for the rest of the games with the 182 Nvidia drivers. I don't mind doing the comparison work to see how much closer the 275 would be to the 4890 if they had kept the earlier drivers.
7Enigma - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
Ah, I see now that the 185's are specifically to enable support for the 275 card. So you can't run the 275 with the 182 drivers. Still would be interesting to see all the data for what happened to the 285 using the newest drivers that decrease the performance at lower resolutions.minime - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
First, thanks for your review(s). I'm a silent reader and word-of-mouth spreader for years.Second, don't you think reviewers should point their fingers a little bit more aggressively to the power-consumption? Not because it's trendy nowadays, but because it's just not sane to waste that much energy in idle (2D, anyone remembers?) mode. I was thrilled what you alone (don't take it as a disrespect) were able to achieve on the SSD issue.
SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
PSST ! The ati cards have like 30 watts more power useage in idle - and like 3 watts less in 3d - so the power thing - well they just declare ati the winner... LOLThey said they were "really surprised" at the 30 watts less in idle for the nvidia - they just couldn't figure it out- and kept rechecking ... but yeah... the 260 was kicking butt.. but... that doesn't matter - ati takes the win using 1-3 watss less in 3D..
So, you know, the red roosters shall not be impugned !
capiche' ?
VulgarDisplay - Friday, April 3, 2009 - link
It appears that you may have had Vsync turned on which caps the game at 60fps in some of the CoD:W@W tests. It's pretty apparent something is up when the nVidia card has the same FPS at 1680x and 1920x. Either way it still seems like the 4890 wins at those resolutions which is different than most sites that pretty much say it's a wash across the board. I'll take nVidia's drivers over ATi's any day.SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
Hey any little trick that smacks nvidia down a notch is not to be pointed out.