GeForce GTX 295 vs. Radeon HD 4870 X2

With the massive amount of data recorded in this article, in single card (dual GPU) and dual card (quad GPU) modes; both need to be accounted for and we've tried to keep things as simple as possible.

Instead of expecting you to work your way through pages and pages of graphs, we’ve compiled a direct comparison between the two highest end products from both parties, in both single card (dual GPU) and dual card (quad GPU) configurations.

The graphs below may seem a little daunting at first, but they are really quite simple to understand:

bar colour:
• dark red = Radeon HD 4870 X2 performance advantage
  
• light red = Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFire (quad CrossFire) performance advantage
  
  
• dark green = GeForce GTX 295 performance advantage
  
• light green = GeForce GTX 295 SLI (quad SLI) performance advantage

All the performance advantages are listed in percentages.

In any tests where neither configuration delivered a playable frame rate (at least 30 frames per second, but higher in some cases), the performance advantage was neglected because an advantage – whether big or small – is only a benefit if the game is playable at those settings.


You’ll note that there are 100 percent performance advantages for the Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFireX configuration in Far Cry 2 (DirectX 9.0) and GRID. Our Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 Quad SLI configuration was unable to play either game without serious issues, crashes or problems so we had to give up. Nvidia is aware of these issues and plans to fix them in a new driver expected before the cards hit the street on January 15th – Far Cry 2 in DirectX 9.0 doesn’t concern us massively (since DirectX 10 mode is quite a bit faster anyway), but GRID does. We’ll talk more about this on the GRID results page.

Crysis and Call of Duty: World at War are particularly strong for Nvidia and there are also respectable advantages in Far Cry 2 and Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway as well. Understandably though, this is not where the GeForce GTX 295 and Radeon HD 4870 X2 excel and you don’t need this much horsepower at what is a fairly mainstream resolution.


Moving up to 1,920 x 1,200, the story continued with the single card battle – Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 295 scored marginal wins in Far Cry 2 and Left 4 Dead, while the wins were more convincing in Crysis, Call of Duty: World at War and Brothers in Arms. Fallout 3 was a dead heat, while GRID and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky were marginal AMD wins.


At 2,560 x 1,600, things got a bit more interesting. Crysis was no longer playable on the single card configurations under DirectX 10 mode and the Radeon scored a massive win in Fallout 3 with 8xAA enabled. On the other hand, Left 4 Dead (with 4xAA), Far Cry 2, Crysis DX9, World at War and Hell’s Highway were comprehensive wins for the GTX 295. The marginal wins generally went in favour of the Radeon, but the losses were pretty significant in some cases.