NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250: A Rebadged 9800 GTX+

Age of Conan Performance

There is one caveat with this test -- the GTS 250 1GB was run with the latest update to Age of Conan which may or may not have affected performance. The settings were adjusted to what they were before the update (high settings with bloom, 4xAA, SM3.0, and advanced transparency).

1680x1050    1920x1200    2560x1600

Age of Conan comes out as basically a tie between the 4850 and the GTS 250 at 1680x1050. If the performance test we ran on the 1GB GTS 250 are on par with the previous tests, then it's basically a tie at playable resolutions between the 1GB GTS 250 and the 512MB 4850, and the extra memory on the GTS 250 does help it scale better as resolution increases.

Call of Duty World at War Performance

NVIDIA hardware sweeps this benchmark with the GTS 250 remaining playable all the way up to 2560x1600 while the 4850 can't hold on past 1920x1200. As there is very little difference between the both the GTS 250 / 1GB and the 4850 CrossFire / X2, it doesn't seem like a 1GB 4850 would help very much here either.

1680x1050    1920x1200    2560x1600