For perhaps the first time in recent memory, we found considerable value in graphics cards that cost less than $100. But today we separate the bargain minded from the merely cheap by considering a pair of high-end graphics cards that offer substantial value in their own right. Tight competition between AMD and NVIDIA has resulted in two new video cards that redefine their end of the market for just a smidgen under $300. Rather stealthily, NVIDIA has ramped up the performance of its GeForce GTX 260 by enabling an additional thread processing cluster and cranking up clock speeds. Meanwhile, AMD has made its Radeon HD 4870 even more potent by doubling the onboard memory. - Tech Report

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Cool Card Review

As you may know if you are a hopeless geek, the GeForce GTX 200 series of graphics cards is based on NVIDIA's GT200 graphics processor. The GeForce GTX 280 is the full-on version of the GT200, while the less expensive GeForce GTX 260 has two of its ten thread processing clusters and one of its eight raster partitions disabled. Now disabling parts of a chip for product segmentation is a common practice, and it can provide a fitting home for chips with portions that are less than perfect, so this basic plan makes sense. Trouble is, NVIDIA didn't count on the Radeon HD 4870 outgunning the GeForce GTX 260 at a lower price.

Despite the fact that these are tremendously complex chips with hundreds of millions of transistors, AMD and NVIDIA have achieved a remarkable amount of parity in their GPU's. In terms of image quality, overall features, performance and even price, the Radeon HD 4870 1GB and the GeForce GTX 260 Reloaded are practically interchangeable. That fact represents something of a comeback for NVIDIA, since the older GeForce GTX 260 cost more than the Radeon HD 4870 and didn't perform quite as well. If anything, the GeForce GTX 260 Reloaded was a smidgen faster than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB overall in our test suite.

The GeForce GTX 260 is based on a much larger chip with a wider path to memory, which almost certainly means it costs more to make than the Radeon HD 4870, but as a consumer, you'd never know it when using the two products, so we're not sure it matters much for our purposes. Even the GeForce GTX 260's power consumption is lower than the Radeon HD 4870's, and its noise levels are comparable. In the grand scheme, NVIDIA may have a slight edge on AMD in some difficult to quantify ways. For instance, GeForce cards generally perform better with the newest game we tested, like Crysis Warhead.

NVIDIA seems to do a better job of working with developers and ensuring good compatibility between its GPU's and new from the box games. By contrast, the Radeon HD 4870 performed below our expectations in Crysis Warhead, and judging by the performance we saw from the Radeon HD 4870 X2, the CrossFire multi-GPU scheme isn't yet working properly with this title. NVIDIA may gain an additional advantage if and when we see PhysX enabled games come to pass, but we wouldn't factor that into a purchasing decision today. On the other hand, AMD releases new drivers more often.

And AMD has much better support for multiple monitors with CrossFire than the kludgy arrangement NVIDIA uses with their SLI technology. Also CrossFire is broadly compatible with Intel chipsets, while NVIDIA generally restricts SLI to nForce based motherboards. So we don't know, but one thing we do know is that, whichever one you prefer, both of these cards are wicked fast for $300. In fact, you probably don't need either one of them unless you plan on using it with a nice, big monitor with a widescreen resolution. Heck, even then, you can get by very well in almost all of today's games with something like a $170 Radeon HD 4850.

What you get when you step up to one of these $300 cards is substantially more GPU power, memory bandwidth, and longevity potential. That may not always be apparent, but it may sometimes be painfully so. Only in a couple of cases did we see the Radeon HD 4870 1GB's extra memory make a difference versus the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. But the difference in Race Driver: GRID was night and day. Personally, given the choice, we'd pony up the extra cash for the 1GB card, just for the peace of mind. But we're probably crazy for saying so.