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4870 1GB vs. GTX280 First Impressions

Boogle said:
Well, I've had both for 3 days now, and have had a chance to do a little gaming, so thought I'd give my first impressions. Hopefully a nice neutral post rather than 'omg ATI r0x0rs my b0x0rs NV cheat and steal babies' or 'NV pwn all NV rule the world, ATI drivers suck'.

I think I'll present my findings in easy to read bullet points:

  • During BIOS/Windows bootup, the resolution output seems to be 4:3 with ATI, 16:10 with NV. It seems NV cards decide that very low resolutions should be scales automatically whereas ATI just outputs what it receives. +1 to ATI cause the stretching is annoying, my monitor is set to scale with the correct aspect ratio not warp everything into a mess.
  • ATI's CCC is much improved over how it used to be. It hasn't crashed on me, and it's better laid out. +1 to ATI.
  • NV's handling of monitors is both more logical and easier. ATI have all sorts of weird, pointless options to work around issues / bugs with high resolution digital displays. +1 to NV
  • NV allows for automatic profiles associated with games. Pretty cool, but annoying that you have to set the same settings for different games over and over. ATI you create a profile, and then apply it from the right-click menu. Both have their faults and improvements. Tie.
  • ATI's drivers are more aggressive re. applying their settings to games. FSAA in UT3? Yes please! +1 to ATI, bigtime.
  • ATI's transparancy AA is pure bliss, love it. +1 to ATI
  • Narrow-Tent causes a big performance drop. -1 to ATI for breaking something that worked well on the 2900XT.
  • NV has more AA modes, and they're all useful in different games. ATI its restricted to just box and edge, the other modes are too slow. +1 to NV
  • NV has WAY fewer driver bugs re. games. +1 to NV
  • Neither cards have crashed or caused unneccesary agro. Tie.

Now for performance:

  • Anyone who says the 4870 1GB can outperform the GTX 280 is kidding themselves. Both cards perform well, but with the 4870 you're never sure what kind of performance you'll get in a game. However, with the 280 it's so consistent you know how it'll perform, and with difficult settings the 280 is much better. So basically you know with a 280, you can play anything with high detail and AA. The 4870... not so much.
  • Crysis performs predictably better on the 280.
  • Stalker: Clear Sky performs about the same in actual playability - but there seems to be some graphical anomolies with ATI.
  • FEAR runs ludicrously well on the Radeon, stupendously well.
  • 280 performs better in Mass Effect, esp when AA is applied. No framerate counters - going purely on responsiveness and smoothness.

Now for noise:

The 4870 1GB model I got is the one with dual fans as offered by Palit / Gainward / Xpertvision (Palit own Gainward and Xpertvision). At idle both the 280 and 4870 are for all intents and purposes, silent. I have 3 low-speed 120mm fans in my case, and its no noisier than them. At load the 280 can vary between barely registering, to really quite noisy. It's never horrible, but you do get a lot of wind sound. If you play a graphically intense, silent game, it could bother you. It bothers me a little. The 4870 stays quiet, it will spin up a little. The first notch it spins up to the pitch increases and it can be very slightly annoying, then it spins up slightly more, the pitch falls back down, and it's basically silent again. Quite odd.

In summary, both are great cards. If I could only have one, and the price difference didn't matter, I would definitely get the 280. However, the 4870 definitely punches above its price point. Very well priced.

Pretty picture of the card:

Click to expand...


Excellent info Boogle, I'm still sitting on the fence between these two. What about temps? I'm still concerned about some of the temps with the 280.
 
Nice info and well put together.All we need now is a price drop on the 280...I think we will see one when the 4850X2 comes to town.
 
Yea they will have to drop there prices because the 4850x2 will be faster in the majority of games. The drivers on the new x2 card should also be mature ones on release which should make the card look better also. Nice review boogle.
 
I would say the GTX is the slightly better card, but not worth paying an extra £100 for. £50 more at max I would say. Also I think 4870 could be more future proof in terms of being dx 10.1 and SM 4.1

Here is the way I see it. If money is not an object just buy 3x GTX 280 or 2x 4870 x2. If it is get 4870 1GB version, save the money and when new cards come out use it towards on of them.

Price for performance goes to 4870 me thinks :)
 
Boogle said:
Hopefully a nice neutral post rather than 'omg ATI r0x0rs my b0x0rs NV cheat and steal babies' or 'NV pwn all NV rule the world, ATI drivers suck'
Click to expand...

i though it was the opposite way , anyway thanks for your opinion my 1 gig 4870 should arrive next week

edit: farcry 2 is dx10.1 ! yey
 
LoadsaMoney said:
They are in the big FraCry 2 thread, but they are done without ATi's incoming hotfix driver that should boost their performance as its Dx10.1.
Click to expand...

But Nvidia didn't need to release a driver.. Their cards are doing fine.. Even in SLI. No offence but whenever there seems a problem with an ATI card all you hear from the red camp is "It'l be fixed with the next driver release".

The more i read on these forums the more i move over to Nvidia. You pay less for ATI but you get a lesser package, makes sense to me. You need to get hold of a GTX for no more than £50 more however, which was achievable last weekend at least..

Thanks for the read Boogle, confirms what many have suspected around here I think.. The benchmarks often favour ATI, the real world gameplay and use always comes back to Nvidia. Unfortunately we can't all buy both cards to compare and ship back the one we don't like!
 
Adrianr said:
But Nvidia didn't need to release a driver.. Their cards are doing fine.. Even in SLI. No offence but whenever there seems a problem with an ATI card all you hear from the red camp is "It'l be fixed with the next driver release".

The more i read on these forums the more i move over to Nvidia. You pay less for ATI but you get a lesser package, makes sense to me. You need to get hold of a GTX for no more than £50 more however, which was achievable last weekend at least..

Thanks for the read Boogle, confirms what many have suspected around here I think.. The benchmarks often favour ATI, the real world gameplay and use always comes back to Nvidia. Unfortunately we can't all buy both cards to compare and ship back the one we don't like!
Click to expand...

nah ati aa(anti-aliasing) and iq(image quality) is more important then no aa(anti-aliasing) and bit more fps

*bites a table and waits till 4870 1 gig *
 
Last edited:
willhub said:
Why are ATi cards so inconsistent with performance? I mean it was same with 3870, 3870X2, now 4870 and all that.

Is it drivers or that 256bit interface??
Click to expand...

I doubt it's the 256bit bus, because the GDDR5 on the 4870 more than makes up for that.

I think it's more a combination of dodgy drivers (lack of optimisation) and an inherent limitation of the R600/R700 architecture. The nvidia architecture is just a lot more efficient, especially in terms of how games can utilise it's stream processors. I read somewhere that under certain conditions, the 800 stream processors on the 4800 cards behave more like 160 stream processors (the nvidia type) and clocked a lot lower too.
 
psychas said:
nah ati aa(anti analyzing) and iq(image quality) is more important then no aa(anti analyzing) and bit more fps

*bites a table and waits till 4870 1 gig *
Click to expand...

Uhhhhh:confused: *translates*

No, ATi AA(anti-aliasing) and IQ(image quality) is more important than no AA(anti-aliasing) and higher fps.

*bites a table and waits until 4870 1GB*
Click to expand...

'anti analyzing' :o *dies* ;):D
 
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