ATI Radeon HD 4870

Verdict:

[+] 48 hours
Fast; great value; quiet

[-] 24 hours
Nvidia's massive price drops have made GeForce GTX 260 very competitive

Given all the various price drops for Nvidia and ATI graphics cards that have happened recently, we’ve held off on our Radeon HD 4870 and GeForce GTX 260 coverage for a little while. Feeling confident that we won’t see too much price-shifting from here on (although don’t quote us that) here's the Custom PC verdict on the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 and ATI Radeon HD 4870.

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 260 now costs as little as £193.86 inc VAT from Overclockers, while the Radeon HD 4870 can now by found for only £170.36 from the same site. This is a big drop in the launch price of the GTX 260 - which, at its launch just a month ago cost £270 inc VAT - while the Radeon HD 4870 cost around £185 inc VAT when it launched.

SPECIFICATIONS

The architecture of ATI's and Nvidia's newest GPUs is very different, and this is reflected in the specifications of the HD 4870 and the GTX 260. You can see just how divergent ATI and Nvidia have been when designing their new GPUs.

The GTX 260 is essentially a GTX 280 with some parts disabled. You read more about the architecture of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 280's design here, but what you’ve basically got in the GTX 260 is a slightly slower chip. Its minus a couple of memory controllers, 48 stream processors and four ROPs when compared to its big brother. That said, the GTX 260 still has a lot of graphics power packed in. Its memory interface is massive compared to the HD 4870's, and it has nearly double the number of ROPs than its red rival.

While the GTX 260 is a cut-down chip, the HD 4870 is ATI’s top-end GPU. While it has only a 256-bit memory interface, it compensates for this by using very high frequency GDDR5 memory to give it more memory bandwidth than both the GTX 260 and its ATI sibling, the HD 4850. ATI has focused on architectural efficiency with its new RV770 GPU, which you can read more about in our analysis of the Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 graphics cards.

GAME PERFORMANCE

Click here to see performance graphs for the Radeon HD 4870 and GeForce GTX 260 (opens in new window)

Race driver: GRID is one of our favourite games at the moment, so we were eager to see which cards could run it at its best. As the ‘Best Playable’ flashes on the benchmark graphs indicate, it turns out that both cards can run the game brilliantly. However, the HD 4870 is faster than the GTX 260 at both test resolutions with 52fps minimum at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4x MSAA from the GTX 260 compared to 66fps minimum from the HD 4870. With such high frame rates, the game ran super-smooth and our car responded gracefully to every command, making us feel like a digital Lewis Hamilton.

Neither card could handle GRID at 2,560 x 1,600 with 4x MSAA (the native resolution of a 30in TFT) though the GTX 260 fared better than the HD 4870. The GeForce card scored a respectable 24fps minimum while the HD 4870 scored only 12fps minimum.

ArmA: Armed Assault is a tough game to run smoothly, as the sparseness of the ‘Best Playable’ tags in the 1,920 x 1,200 graphs shows. At 1,680 x 1,050 the GTX 260 produced an admirable minimum of 31fps and an average of 53fps, while the HD 4870 lagged behind with a minimum of only 26fps and an average of 47fps.

Crysis is another graphics card killer, and proved even harsher on our graphics silicon than ArmA. Again, the GTX 260 proved slightly faster than the HD 4870 with its minimum of 26fps compared to 24fps at 1,680 x 1,050 with 2x AA. The average frame rates in Crysis were much closer though, with the GTX 260 averaging 32fps and the HD 4870 31fps.

In Call of Duty 4, the HD 4870 came out top with 39fps minimum at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4x AA compared to only a 33fps minimum from the GTX 260.

POWER CONSUMPTION

Click here to see the power consumption graphs (opens in new window)

ATI and Nvidia are always keen to talk about how little power their GPUs use, and Nvidia comes out on top in this test. We use the Canyon Flight test of 3DMark06 and measure power consumption for the whole test PC at the mains plug. With the GTX 260 installed we saw a peak power draw of 376W, while with the HD 4870 installed our PC drew a peak of 394W. The GTX 260 consumes 18W less than the HD 4870 when both are fully stressed. We should also mention that both cards run rather hot, though the HD 4870 is quieter than the rather loud GTX 260.

CONCLUSION

Deciding between the HD 4870 and GTX 260 is very tough given the latest round of price drops. At launch, the HD 4870 was the obvious buy as it was at least as fast as the GTX 260 yet cost £85 less. Now that the price difference is only £24 working out which is the better card is much tougher.

The GTX 260 is the better card in our two more demanding test games, Crysis and ArmA: Armed Assualt. In Crysis, the performance lead is less marked, but that the GTX 260 is faster in the more demanding games could mean that it’ll handle new graphically demanding games better as they get released.

The HD 4870 is much faster than the GTX 260 in Call of Duty 4 and Race Driver: GRID, but then it’s not as if the GTX 260 can’t run these games and enjoyably high frame rates even at very high resolutions. That the GTX 260 is slightly more power frugal is another plus for Nvidia's chip, though its noisy cooler is a definite negative.

Almost inevitably, which card you should choose comes down to how much you want to spend. If £170 is all you fancy splashing out, then the HD 4870 won’t let you down. If you can spend the extra on the GTX 260 we’d say it’s worthwhile – the extra performance in the more taxing games should give it more of a chance of smoothly running the headline games of this and next year.

The cheapest ATI Radeon HD 4870 we found at time of writing was Gainward's on Overclockers.com, which costs £170.36 in VAT.

For more information on the ATI Radeon HD 4870, please visit the AMD Game website, here.

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