GeForce GTX 275 Versus Radeon HD 4890 Video Card Battle

Testing With New Drivers and New Games

A fellow journalist and close friend of mine was complaining the other day that all the video card reviews that are being published these days are cookie cutter reviews that use the same boring and old game titles. I’d have to agree with him and when he questioned the validity of benchmarking with the original Crysis game title he did have a point to an extent. The video game Crysis was developed by Crytek and published by Electronic Arts way back in November 2007. While the video game has been followed up by Crysis Warhead and expansion packs like Crysis Wars and Crysis Maximum Edition the original game is still often used for benchmarking. Why is Crysis still used in benchmarks then? Truth be told it still has a way of bringing video cards to their knees quite well when run with Very High image quality settings and for benchmarking purposes that is sometimes needed to show performance differences between products. That being said the conversation I had did make me think though why I haven’t been benchmarking with different games more often.

Rather than sitting around and thinking about the ‘whats’ and ‘whys’ I headed up to the local target and picked up a few game titles that I knew nothing about, but figured what the heck. I gave myself a budget no more than $24.99 per game and picked up a few titles that I would never usually buy in a million years. I ended up buying the following games.

• Wall-E – $19.99 plus shipping (50% off at Target locally YMMV)
• Nancy Drew Ransom of the Seven Ships – $17.99 plus shipping
• Velvet Assassin – $49.98 plus shipping (50% off at Target locally YMMV)

Only Velvet Assassin and Wall-E could be used for benchmarking though as Nancy Drew:
Ransom of the Seven Ships has more video clips in it than anything else and the frame rate was between 500-700 FPS. That makes it completely pointless to benchmark as the game will not stutter or be GPU limited on either of these mainstream graphics cards.

That being said, let’s take the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 with Forceware 190.38 drivers and the ATI Radeon HD 4890 with CATALYST 9.7 drivers and see how they do on Velvet Assassin, Wall-E and a few other benchmarks. We haven’t looked at these two cards since April and video card drivers have been updated several times since then. Let’s try to see which card is faster and which is the one to own!