Graphics Slugfest: ATI Radeon HD 4850 CF, HD 4870, HD 4870 CF vs. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260, GTX 280Benchmarking: Crysis, World in Conflict and Unreal Tournament 3
The GeForce GTX 260 manages to edge out the Radeon HD 4870 in Crysis High Quality benchmark. The GeForce GTX 280 gives about 25% higher frames over the Radeon HD 4870. The two CrossFire setups have better performance over the GTX 280, but stumble at the high resolution of 2560 x 1600.
Slotting two GeForce GTX 260 cards into an SLI board would probably make things playable on High Quality at 2560 x 1600, but not so for ATI's Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 CrossFire setups.
The ATI Radeon cards take a big hit in performance at 2560 x 1600, with the Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire returning a poorer result as compared to a single HD 4870.
The bottom line is this: With all the cards/CrossFire setups we have tested for this article, Crysis is still unplayable at Very High Quality settings, even the Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire.
A very close call between the GeForce GTX 260 and Radeon HD 4870 cards here. I'll be hard-pressed to choose a better card if I was given only this graph. The GeForce GTX 280 gives an approximate 20% jump over the Radeon HD 4870, while the Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire setup produces about 30% better results over the GTX 280.
We see a similar type of result between the High Quality and Very High Quality benchmarks. The GeForce GTX 260 and Radeon HD 4870 are level, while the GeForce GTX 280 sits in between the Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 CrossFire setups.
The GeForce GTX 260 and Radeon HD 4870 are neck-to-neck in our Unreal Tournament 3 benchmark - no more than four frames separate each other. The GeForce GTX 280 pulls ahead comfortably from its younger brother. Needless to say, the two-card solutions top the graphs. As observed earlier on, the HD 4870 CrossFire setup scales well, especially at high resolution.
The GeForce GTX 260 continues playing its sneaky game, but this time round, it manages to outrun the Radeon HD 4870 by quite a margin for the low- and mid-resolution tests. The gap narrows considerably at high resolution, but it still gets ahead by six-odd frames per second.
Seems like there's a slip-up by AMD here, its Radeon HD 4850 CrossFire setup pales in comparison to the single-card GeForce GTX 280. The Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire is still quicker than the GTX 280 and we can see it actually returns close to 100% frame rate improvement across all resolutions over a single HD 4870 in this benchmark.
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