ATI Radeon HD 4890 vs. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on April 2, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
CUDA - Oh there’s More
Oh I’m not done. Other than PhysX, NVIDIA is stressing CUDA as another huge feature that no other GPU maker on the world has.
For those who aren’t familiar, CUDA is a programming interface to NVIDIA hardware. Modern day GPUs are quite powerful, easily capable of churning out billions if not a trillion instructions per second when working on the right dataset. The problem is that harnessing such power is a bit difficult. NVIDIA put a lot of effort into developing an easy to use interface to the hardware and eventually it evolved into CUDA.
Now CUDA only works on certain NVIDIA GPUs and certainly won’t talk to Larrabee or anything in the ATI camp. Both Intel and ATI have their own alternatives, but let’s get back to CUDA for now.
The one area that GPU computing has had a tremendous impact already is the HPC market. The applications there lent themselves very well to GPU programming and thus we see incredible CUDA penetration there. What NVIDIA wants however is CUDA in the consumer market, and that’s a little more difficult.
The problem is that you need a compelling application and the first major one we looked at was Elemental’s Badaboom. The initial release of Badaboom fell short of the mark but over time it became a nice tool. While it’s not the encoder of choice for people looking to rip Blu-ray movies, it’s a good, fast way of getting your DVDs and other videos onto your iPod, iPhone or other portable media player. It only works on NVIDIA GPUs and is much faster than doing the same conversion on a CPU if you have a fast enough GPU.
The problem with Badaboom was that, like GPU accelerated PhysX, it only works on NVIDIA hardware and NVIDIA isn’t willing to give away NVIDIA GPUs to everyone in the world - thus we have another catch 22 scenario.
Badaboom is nice. If you have a NVIDIA GPU and you want to get DVD quality content onto your iPod, it works very well. But spending $200 - $300 on a GPU to run a single application just doesn’t seem like something most users would be willing to do. NVIDIA wants the equation to work like this:
Badaboom -> You buy a NVIDIA GPU
But the equation really works like this:
Games (or clever marketing) -> You buy a NVIDIA GPU -> You can also run Badaboom
Now if the majority of applications in the world required NVIDIA GPUs to run, then we’d be dealing in a very different environment, but that’s not reality in this dimension.
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Psyside - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
Can anyone tell me about the testing metod average or maximum fps? thanks.Jamahl - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
some sites have the gtx275 clearly winning at all games, all resolutions.helldrell666 - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
You can't trust every site you check.especially since most of those sites don't post their funders names on their main page.You must've heard of Hardocp's Kyle who was fired by nvidia because he mentioned that the gtx250 is a renamed 9800gtx.7Enigma - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
I think this is due to Nvidia shooting themselves in the leg with the 185 drivers. With the performance penalty at the normal resolutions, anyone testing with the 185's is going to get lower results than someone testing with the previous drivers. And I'm sure you could find 10 games that all perform better on ATI/NVIDIA. That's the problem with game selection and the only real answer is what types of games you play and what engines you think will be used heavily for the next 2 years.SiliconDoc - Monday, April 6, 2009 - link
Well the REAL ANSWER is - if you play at 2650, or even if you don't, and have been a red raging babbling lying idiot red rooster for 6 months plus pretending along with Derek that 2650x is the only thing that matters, now you have a driver for NVidia that whips the ati top dog core...If you're ready to reverse 6 months of red ranting and raving for 2560X ati wins it all, just keep the prior NV driver, so the red roosters screaming they now win because they suddenly are stuck at the LOWER REZ tier to claim a win, can be blasted to pieces anyway- at that resolution.
So - NVidia now has a driver choice - the new for the high rez crown they took from the red fanboy ragers, and the prior driver which SPANKS THE RED CARD AGAIN at the lower rez.
Make sure to collude with all the raging red roosters to keep that as hush hush as possible.
1. spank the 790 at lower rezz with the older Nvidia driver
2. spank the 790 at the highest rez with the new driver
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Don't worry if you can't understand just keep hopping around flapping those litttle wings and clucking so that red gobbler jouces around - don't worry soft PhysX can display that flabby flapper !
The0ne - Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - link
Can someone ban this freaking idiot. The last few posts of his have been nothing but moronic, senseless rants. Jesus Christ, buy a gun and shoot yourself already.SiliconDoc - Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - link
Ahh, you don't like the points, so now you want death. Perhaps you should be banned, mr death wisher.If you don't like the DOZENS of valid points I made, TOO BAD - because you have no response - now you sound like krz1000 and his endless list of names, the looney red rooster that screeches the same thing you just did, then posts a link to youtube with a freaky slaughter video.
If I wasn't here, the endless LIES would go unopposed, now GO BACK and respond to my points LIKE MAN, if you have anything, which no doubt, you do not.
helldrell666 - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
According to xbitlabs, the 4890 beats the gtx285 at 1920x1200 resolution with 4x aa in Cod5, Crysis Warhead, Stalker CS, Fallout 3 and loses in Far Cry2.Here, the 4890 matches in Far Cry 2 and cod5 with some slightly lower fps than the gtx285 in Crysis warhead.Strange....
7Enigma - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
That is crazy. There is no way variations should be that huge between the 2 tests, regardless of the area they chose to test in the game. Anandtech has it as essentially a wash, while Xbit has the 4890 20% faster!?! (COD:WaW)7Enigma - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link
Just looked closer at the Xbitlabs review. The card they used was an OC variant that had 900MHz core instead of the stock 850MHz. In certain games that are not super graphically intensive I'm willing to bet at 1920X1200 they may still be core starved and not memory starved so a 50MHz increase may explain the discrepancy.I've got to admit you need to take the Xbitlabs article with a grain of salt if they are using the OC variant as the base 4890 in all of their charts....that's pretty shady...