Another Look at the $180 Price Point: 260 core 216 vs. 4870 1GB

With the change in performance with the 185 drivers from NVIDIA, we wanted to breakout one of the other most important price points. With lower resolution performance sometimes showing degraded performance and higher resolutions popping up with improvements, this price point is worth exploring.

Overall, it looks like the 4870 1GB is just a little bit faster in one or two games, but these cards are still pretty well matched after the new driver. the scaling differences really wouldn't change our minds either way. Both of these cards are good options.

What will an Extra $70 Get You? Radeon HD 4890 vs. Radeon HD 4870 1GB Putting this PhysX Business to Rest
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  • Snarks - Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - link

    One is an open, one is not.

    Jesus christ.

    The fact you have to pay extra on top of the card prices to use these features is a no go. You start to lose value, thus negating the effect these "features" have.

    p.s ATI have similar features to nvidia, what they have is nothing new.
  • SiliconDoc - Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - link

    Did you see a charge for ambient occlusion ?
    Here you are "clucky clucky cluck cluck !"
    Red rooster, the LIARS crew.
  • SiliconDoc - Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - link

    One ? I count for or five. I never had to pay extra outside card cost for PhysX, did you ?
    You see, you people will just lie your yappers off.
    Yeah ati has PhysX - it's own. ROFLMAO
    Look, just jump around and cluck and flap the rooster wings and eat some chickseed, you all can believe eachothers LIES. Have a happy lie fest, dude.
  • bill3 - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link

    Personally while you bring up good points I'd much, much, MUCH rather have the thorough explanation of CUDA and PHYSX and the relevance thereof, they gave us than power, heat and overclocking numbers you can get at dozens of other reviews. The former is insight, the latter just legwork.
  • joos2000 - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link

    I really like to soft shadows you get in the corners with the new AO features in nVidia's drivers. Very neat.
  • dryloch - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link

    I had a 4850 that I bought at launch. I was very excited when ATI released their Video Convertor app. I spent days trying to make that produce watchable video. Then I realized that every website that tested it had the same result. They released a broken POS and have yet to fix it. I did not appreciate them treating me like that so when I replaced the card I switched out to Nvidia. I have gone back and forth but this time I think I will stick with Nvidia for a while.
  • duploxxx - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link

    and by buying Nvidia you already knew that you didn't have POS so in the end you have the same result, except for the fact that the 48xx series really had a true performance advantage with that price range so your rebranded replacement just gave you 1) additional cost and 2) really 0 added value, so your grass is a bit to green.....
  • Exar3342 - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link

    "0 added value"? Really? He didn't have a GPU video converter that worked on his ATI card, and now he DOES have a working program with his Nvidia card. Sounds like added value to me. He gets the same performance, pretty much the same price, and working software. Not a bad deal...
  • z3R0C00L - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link

    The GPU converted that comes with nVIDIA is horrible (better than ATi's though).

    I use Cyberlink PowerDirector 7 Ultra which supports both CUDA and Stream. Worth mentioning that Stream is faster.
  • Spoelie - Thursday, April 2, 2009 - link

    Is the 30$ pricetag of badaboom included in the "pretty much the same price"? If it isn't, then actually there is no added value. You have a converter (value, well only if your goal is to put video's on your ipod and it's worth 30$ to you to do it faster) but you have to pay for it extra. The only thing the nvidia card provides is the ability to accelerate that program, you don't actually get the program.

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