Introduction

Six Top 10 games with Radeon 4870 1 GB & GeForce GTX 260 Core 216

Christmas is coming up and the entire VGA pricing model typically shifts a little prior to it. Two products that I personally can recommend very much for that wish list or under that Christmas tree are both the Radeon HD 4870 1024MB and the GeForce GTX 260 (Core 216 preferably). I both like these graphics rendering goblins as they are both located in an affordable price range, both have a lot of raw rendering power and both have a lot of memory, something that is becoming increasingly important with DirectX 10 games as we noticed often lately.

So over the past couple of weeks some interesting stuff has happened really, the Radeon dropped in price and can now be found for as little as 269 USD. NVIDIA a while ago also dropped their pricing model and the GTX 260 Core 216 version is also below 300 USD but... a little birdie told me that prices on this card are going to drop this week as well, maybe even below that Radeon HD 4870 1024MB. yeah, it would be a head on head attack from NVIDIA against ATI.

And granted, the history is pretty interesting when you follow this kind of stuff. Let's place the two products in a little historical perspective:

• NVIDIA released GeForce GTX 260
• ATI Released the 4870 512MB
• NVIDIA dropped pricing model
• Then NVIDIA answered with the GTX 260 Core 216
• ATI answered with a 1024 MB model of the 4870
• NVIDIA now answers with pricing model, big bang drivers and "old" GTX 260 going EOL.

As you can notice, there's a bit of a skirmish going on between the two companies. This week NVIDIA is launching another driver in their Big Bang series, which might be considered as a small innuendo towards pr0n for geeks I guess. The interesting part is that the driver, next to the recently added PhysX features and Multi-monitor SLI gaming options, offers a pretty good performance increase.

Now the tale goes like this; when the GTX 260 core 216 was released, we got a phone call from ATI, asking if we'd like to do an article on the Radeon HD 4870 1024 MB comparing it with the GTX 260 C216. And sure, why not.  Then with the new driver being released this week, we got a phone call from NVIDIA, asking if we would like to do such a direct comparison article. And we figured... sure, that's fair enough. More power to consumers... wooooah.

There is however going to be one difference from Guru3D's side, I want only the absolutely newest gaming titles in the test, and we need them to be top 10 title games. Where possible we'll flick on the high image quality settings, DX10, 4x AA and high anisotropic filtering. Now since we do not want to be CPU limited whatsoever we'll be testing on the new Core i7 965 @ 3750 MHz / X58 platform.

So the games we'll be using are the following six top 10 titles:

• Far Cry 2
• Dead Space
• Fallout 3
• Call of Duty 5: World at War
• Crysis WARHEAD
• Brothers in Arms Hell's Highway

So yes, that's six games as we decided to throw in another title at the last moment that you can find in the most top 10 PC charts lists at this very moment. The rules are simple, each card will be configured exactly the same... each game will be configured exactly the same, our test system... is configured exactly the same. All in all it's crunch time, mano el mano... let's the games commence.