ATI Radeon HD 4890 vs NVIDIA Geforce GTX 275 Official Reviews Released

After stagnant months in the graphics card market with AMD’s product freeze and NVIDIA’s rebranding attempts, seeing both the Radeon HD 4890 1GB and the GeForce GTX 275 896MB card in the same month is a breath of fresh air. The HD 4890 1GB card is not much more than a highly overclocked RV770 design, but that is more than enough to see noticeable performance gains across the board. In fact, we saw nearly uniform 10-15% performance jumps at ALL resolutions from 1600x1200 to 2560x1600 which indicates to me that AMD has really found the bottleneck of its architecture in this RV790 product. In games like Far Cry 2 and Crysis, that 15% performance jump could easily allow you to move up a resolution or increase AA or AF settings to improve overall image quality.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 896MB card was obviously a late addition to the company’s product line and you can tell that when you talk to their partners – rushed orders, new stickers to be printed, etc. That doesn’t really matter to the end user but what does is a reasonable 5-8% increase in performance in most games that the GTX 275 offers over the GTX 260+ card. The results for NVIDIA are much less consistent than they were for AMD’s new product – this could be from just a differing bottleneck than AMD’s cards or a lack of time to really find the sweet spot for all three frequencies to get the most out of the additional power. Even though the GTX 275’s performance GAIN over the GTX 260+ might not be as large or as consistent, in many cases the GTX 275 is a more powerful solution for gaming than the Radeon HD 4890.