Power Consumption and Final Thoughts
AMD Radeon HD 4890 RV790 and GeForce GTX 275 Review - Graphics Cards 82

Interestingly, the HD 4890 doesn’t appear to be using that much more power than the HD 4870 under load, but it also isn’t using any LESS power at idle in our test bed.  We’ll be looking into our methods here and AMD’s claims to see which is really in question.  What we can clearly see is that the GTX 275 uses noteably more power than the GTX 260+.

Performance

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 1600×1200 to 2560×1600 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. 

AMD Radeon HD 4890 RV790 and GeForce GTX 275 Review - Graphics Cards 83

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.

Filler cards?

One debate that has come up for both of these cards is their livelihood for the future – are these cards simply fly-by-the-night additions to the road map to spark up the GPU world or are they long term graphics cards that you’ll be able to find (and potentially upgrade in a multi-GPU system) for many months?  The obvious answer to this is that while the HD 4890 looks to be a longer term product, all indications show that the GTX 275 was really invented as an answer to the RV790 and has not been planned for all that well.

I spoke with several NVIDIA partners that stated the same thing: orders were surprisingly high from retailers and e-tailers for the GTX 275 though it didn’t appear that the card was going to be available for more than a couple of months before being replaced by a lower cost GTX 285, for example.  AMD calls this a “review spoiler” meaning that NVIDIA only wanted to steal some of the spotlight from AMD on today’s release.  I tend to call it a nice one-time purchase option for the enthusiast gamer.

Pricing and Availability

Last week on the podcast we were very excited about how much gaming performance you could get in a GPU for under $175 or so; now we are going to be including the $250 price range as well.  Here is how AMD sees it:

 
AMD Radeon HD 4890 RV790 and GeForce GTX 275 Review - Graphics Cards 84

Obviously NVIDIA would likely see the lineups a little bit different, putting the GTX 275 above the HD 4890.  Regardless, the pricing of these cards is truly impressive.  AMD is saying today that the Radeon HD 4890 1GB cards will sell for “under $260” which usually means $259 – but I think we’ll see the street prices closer to $240.  You will likely find the HD 4890s for sale today; if they weren’t online yesterday.    NVIDIA is planning on selling the GTX 275 896MB card for $249 and they should start being available in mid-April. 

One interesting debate to consider: does the additional 10-15% of the HD 4890 1GB card warrant the price increase from $199 to $249 or so?  What about the 5-8% gain for the GTX 275 over the GTX 260+ that will cost you closer to $80?

Update: Good news!  The Radeon HD 4890s are in stock from vendors like MSI, XFX, Diamond and more!  Many of them are going for $229 after a mail-in rebate making the card even more attractive than we mentioned above.  GeForce GTX 275s were also in stock for about $259 but as of this update they are all missing in action…

Reference versus Overclocked Cards

We have had a lot of debates with both NVIDIA and AMD about whether or not we should be testing reference or overclocked cards from partners.  Obviously, we have to pick one side or other most of the time as they are MANY different configurations of any given card.  For example, BFG will offer three difference speeds of the GeForce GX 275: OC, OC2 and OCX.  AMD’s partners have been a lot slower adopting the world of out-of-the-box overclocked cards but that seems to be changing as the months go by. 

Today AMD claims that the reference speed of the HD 4890 are 850 MHz core but in my discussions most AMD partners will be offering speeds at 900 MHz – the same speed our sample from XFX shipped at.  You’ll notice though that our GTX 275 sample runs at “reference” speeds instead – this is because the only card we had in before the launch was indeed an NVIDIA reference design.  Will faster GTX 275s be out in the near future?  Yes.  Will we be testing them?  Absolutely.

Final Thoughts

Both the AMD Radeon HD 4890 1GB card and the GeForce GTX 275 896MB from NVIDIA are welcome additions to the GPU market and I think it’s difficult to pick a complete and final winner in the debate.  Both cards perform very similarly, with perhaps a slight performance lead to the GTX 275 896MB card in a few games even though the Radeon HD 4890 did see a better performance INCREASE over the lower priced card in the lineup.  Yes, AMD seems to be pushing the engineering side of things with the RV790 while NVIDIA is more pushing product and marketing, but in the end, a graphics card can only be judged on overall gaming experience.  In this case, both are pretty equally matched. 



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