The charts tell the key story for most gamers. Nvidia outpaces the Asus card on all of our benchmarks but one lower resolution Left4Dead test, on which the Asus card wins by a single, statistically irrelevant frame. Otherwise, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 295 is just faster. In general, we don't think you should expect a bad gaming experience with the Asus card (or any other Radeon HD4870X2) with current titles, but you may find you want to replace this card more quickly than you would a GeForce GTX 295 once more challenging games come out down the road.
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
 |
Load | |
Idle |
We didn't quite know what to expect from the GTX 295 compared with the Radeon EAHD4870X2 for performance, but upon seeing the Nvidia card's faster frame rates, we assumed the Asus card would at least be more power efficient. Not so. As you can see, both at idle and under load, the Asus card is a bigger power hog. Any 3D card that uses more than 400 watts is an energy-consumption beast, so the GTX 295 is only the lesser of two evils, but by using more power for slower performance, the Asus card's outlook is even darker.
If we're down on the Asus EAHD4870X2 for price-performance and energy inefficiency, we can blame both AMD and Nvidia for advertising advanced features technically supported in their respective hardware, but that lack mainstream utility. Consider the example of Nvidia's PhysX accelerated game-physics technology. A fully PhysX-enabled game may be the most immersive experience around; but game developers have only started programming around PhysX in very minor, nonconsequential ways, making it hard to argue that PhysX is a compelling reason to buy a graphics card.
If we can't get that excited about PhysX at the moment, we have the same ambivalence for AMD's early-bird support for DirectX 10.1. This most recent update to Windows' DirectX programming model came with Vista Service Pack 1 (if you installed SP1, you have DirectX 10.1), and enabled a handful of graphics tweaks for game developers. To date, only Far Cry 2 and STALKER: Clear Sky support DirectX 10.1 (the PC version of Assassin's Creed came with DX 10.1 support, but lost it in a patch due to problems with its implementation).
We're sure more games will come that add DX 10.1 support, but with Windows 7 and DirectX 11 on the near-horizon, you can bet that any effort to support a new-fangled programming interface will focus on those instead. By the time Windows 7 hits, you can expect both AMD and Nvidia will have compatible hardware. And even if there's only scant game support for DirectX 11 at launch (as with DirectX 10 and Vista), the next full-fledged version of DirectX will receive broader game-developer interest in the long term than a short-lived, incremental update like DirectX 10.1. Thus, purchasing an AMD card for its support of DirectX 10.1 would be extremely short-sighted.
Like Nvidia, AMD is also trying to market its GPUs as alternative processors for certain kinds of software, primarily involving digital-media processing. This movement is still in its early days, and we don't expect it to reach a critical mass until DirectX 11, a component of which is supposed to provide developers with a neutral, broadly adopted standard for the purpose. You will hear more about parallel computing (as it's known) as each graphics-card vendor amps up its marketing efforts leading in to the launch of Windows 7 (Nvidia's "Visual Computing" campaign is already well underway), but as with PhysX and DirectX 10.1 support, bringing parallel computing to the graphics processor won't receive broad software support, and thus should not be a primary buying consideration for most consumers for quite some time.
Finally, we mentioned a minor installation benefit for AMD earlier, and if you're familiar with AMD's recent 3D chips, you probably know that we're referring to the Radeon EAHD4870X2's built-in audio processing capability. The advantage is that it lets you use the card's HDMI port (via an included DVI-to-HDMI adapter) to pipe out digital audio without bothering with other internal wiring. Both Nvidia and AMD support encoded HD-video playback (via Blu-ray players, for example), but without a built-in audio processor, Nvidia cards require you to wire the output from your PC's sound chip to its graphics cards. Avoiding that step is a minor feather in AMD's cap, and we don't envision many home theater PC enthusiasts dropping $550 on a high-end PC gaming card when a $100 card (or less) will serve their purposes just as well. Still, given the beating AMD has taken from Nvidia on performance and efficiency, we want to be sure we give out the credit we can.
Test bed configuration
Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 64-bit; 3.2GHz Intel Core i7 965; Intel X58 chipset; 4GB 1,066MHz DDR3 SDRAM; 150GB 10,000rpm Western Digital Raptor hard drive
What You'll Pay
- Set Price Alert
