Mainstream GPU Shootout: GeForce GTX 275 vs Radeon 4890

GeForce GTX 275 and AMD Radeon 4890

Both GPUs feature dual-slot cooling

Thanks to cutthroat competition between ATI and NVIDIA, and arguably the most brutal economic downturn since the Great Depression, getting a high-end graphics card for gaming has never been more affordable than it is today. Right now $200 buys you a tremendous amount of performance – both NVDIA’s GeForce GTX 260 and ATI’s Radeon 4870 1GB can be found for $200 or even less if you’re willing to put up with mail-in rebates.

Despite a drop in consumer demand and declining revenues, both companies appear to be willing to sacrifice their margins in order to keep in step with each other.

This tit-for-tat battle that started with last year’s arrival of the Radeon 4800 series appeared to be thawing when ATI decided not to respond to the arrival of the GeForce GTX 285 and GTX 295 earlier this year, but in the last 30 days we’ve seen a flurry of activity.

NVIDIA kicked things off with the launch of the GeForce GTS 250. Essentially a rebadged GeForce 9800 GTX+, the GTS 250 incorporated a number of tweaks that were designed to make the board more affordable for NVIDIA and their partners to produce. Consumers benefited from the reduced power consumption, smaller board design, and most importantly, the 1GB frame buffer and reduced price points, with cards ranging from about $130-$170 at launch.

ATI responded to the arrival of the GeForce GTS 250 with aggressive price cuts. The Radeon 4870 512MB’s price was slashed from around $200 to just $150, while the 1GB Radeon 4870 SKU took over the $200 price point. ATI’s Radeon 4850 went from $150 to about $125 as a result of the cuts.

NVIDIA’s board partners were then forced to respond with cuts of their own to the GeForce GTX 260. You can now find these cards online for prices starting right around $160 after rebate on etail sites like Newegg.

55-nm GTX 260 up top, GTX 275 bottom

Up top sits the Radeon 4870, flanked by the 4890 on the bottom

While all this was going on however, ATI was working behind the scenes to bring up the launch of their highly anticipated Radeon 4870 successor, the Radeon 4890. Rumors have been swirling for months in the hopes that we’d see an enhanced architecture with more shading units and higher clocks based around TSMC’s smaller 40-nm manufacturing process, but that’s not what we’re getting today. Instead ATI’s latest graphics offering is based on their original RV770 GPU, only they’ve made tweaks to the architecture to enable higher clock speeds.

Not wanting to be outdone by ATI, NVIDIA has rushed a new card of their own into service based on their brand new GT200b GPU launched in January with the GeForce GTX 285 and GTX 295. This new GPU has been designated as the GeForce GTX 275.

As its name indicates, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 275 slots right in between the GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 285 in performance.


Together, these two new GPUs encompass the last hurrah for the DirectX 10 era of gaming. Later this year we’ll see the debut of the first DirectX 11 cards from ATI and NVIDIA. Presumably these next-generation cards will deliver higher performance, but they probably won’t be cheap either. With today’s GeForce GTX 275 and Radeon 4890 launch, ATI and NVIDIA are aiming for the price/performance sweet spot of the market. Both GPUs are being offered at or below $250. Let’s see how they compare to one another…