A GeForce GTX 280 delivered more performance than a Radeon HD 4870 X2

Sep 26, 2008 08:49 GMT  ·  By

The world of high demanding games widens every day. While the level of realism of games rises at a constant rate, graphics card manufacturers have to keep up with providing the powerful hardware support which can enable users to fully enjoy the game play. Both game developers and graphics solution makers have difficult tasks to fulfill in order to raise the performance bar with each and every new release.

And when it comes to playing a resource hungry game, users are interested in buying the hardware support that will enable a seamless gaming experience. Benchmarking may provide a guideline in this direction and that is why the guys from Hardspell thought it would be interesting to take a bunch of graphics cards, put them one by one on the same system, run Crysis WarHead and see the results.

The system used for testing featured an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 3.00GHz (LGA775), x2 Kingston HyperX 2GB PC2-8500 Memory Modules, ASUS P5E3 Premium (Intel X48) motherboard, OCZ GameXStream (700 watt) power supply and a Seagate 500GB 7200-RPM (Serial ATA300) hard drive. The operating system was Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 (64-bit), while the drivers used included Intel System Driver 8.4.0.1016, NVIDIA GeForce 175.19 WHQL, GeForce 177.79 WHQL, GeForce 177.41 WHQL and ATI Catalyst 8.9 WHQL.

The results unveiled 14 graphics cards capable of running Crysis WarHead while rendering different frames per second levels. All cards ran DirectX10 and the same version of the game at different display resolutions and at different display quality. The leading card proved to be a GeForce GTX 280 (1G) GPU, which offered better performance at gamer and mainstream quality levels, but lost the first place in favor of a Radeon HD 4870 X2 (2GB) GPU at the enthusiastic quality of display and a 1920x1200 resolution.

The cards tested come from different makers and none is referenced. The list of the graphics boards tested is as follows: ASUS GeForce 9600 GT (512M), Inno3D GeForce 8800 GT (512M), ASUS GeForce 8800 GTS (512M), Inno3D GeForce 9800 GT (512M), Inno3D GeForce 9800 GTX (512M), Inno3D GeForce 9800 GTX+ (512M), Gigabyte GeForce GTX 260 (896M), ASUS GeForce GTX 280 (1G), ASUS Radeon HD 3850 (512MB), ASUS Radeon HD 3870 (512MB), ASUS Radeon HD 3870 X2 (1GB), ASUS Radeon HD 4850 (512MB), VisionTek Radeon HD 4870 (512MB) and Diamond Radeon HD 4870 X2 (2GB).

As the testing shows, NVIDIA-based cards seem to deliver better performance than ATI-based ones. Yet, as they are not reference cards, some of the performance offered comes from the maker as well. Also, the drivers used have great importance on the overall performance of the cards, since both NVIDIA and ATI included new features and enhancements in their latest releases. For those interested in knowing which card performs better, more details on the test results can be found here.

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Radeon HD 4870 X2 runs Crysis better than GeForce GTX 280
GeForce GTX 280 runs Crysis better than Radeon HD 4870 X2
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