NVIDIA just recently has been turning up the heat and with the holiday season almost here they are pushing their GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 graphics card harder than ever. Of course ATI is able to answer with the Radeon HD 4870 1GB edition, but how does it compare in the latest and greatest games? The Radeon HD 4870 512MB was launched right around the same time as the GeForce GTX 260, some five months ago now. The Radeon HD 4870 delivered a similar level of performance at a significantly lower price tag, which as such making it the more attractive option. So therefore NVIDIA was forced to lower their pricing from $450 before launch day to $400 once released to be competitive. - Legion Hardware

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Card Style Review

However this was not enough to compete with the Radeon HD 4870 which was selling for just $300, and therefore NVIDIA finally ended up matching the $300 price tag, after a few months. Still, even at roughly the same price, the GeForce GTX 260 was simply an alternative and there was no real need to push aside the Radeon HD 4870. So at roughly the same price the GeForce GTX 260 was now competitive with the Radeon HD 4870 card, delivering better performance in some games while falling short in others. The problem was, by this stage everyone was jumping up and down about the Radeon HD 4870 accelerator.

This was obviously quite a large problem for NVIDIA and they just needed to do something quickly if they wanted to secure a lot more sales. Therefore, they tweaked the GeForce GTX 260 and re-released it as the GeForce GTX 260. The new version was the same in just about every way, but while the original version featured 192 stream processors, the new version was upgraded to 216 shaders. The end result was more performance, around ten percent more performance on average. This meant that in games where the GeForce GTX 260 was already faster than the Radeon HD 4870, it was now much faster.

However while all this was happening, Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards outfitted with 1GB of memory rather than just 512MB were starting to become much more common. Furthermore, they were matching the price of the new GeForce GTX 260 graphics cards and also offered a slight performance boost over the 512MB version. So really, much has changed since we first looked at the Radeon HD 4870 and GeForce GTX 260 graphics cards, and therefore our original verdict is probably no longer valid. And furthermore, while these two graphics cards have changed quite a bit since their release, so have the games.

NVIDIA has been working hard over the past few months to get the GeForce GTX 260 up to speed, and now they finally have. The recent success of the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 cannot be contributed to any one thing we believe, as NVIDIA has worked hard to improve this graphics card in more ways than one. For example, it is not only faster, it is also much cheaper and it also has to be said that driver support has been very good. The GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 is now matching the price of the Radeon HD 4870 1GB card, and we have even found examples online that are much cheaper, so price is no longer a concern.

There is also no longer any concern with the performance of the GeForce GTX 260, particularly when focusing on the more recently released titles. Although we do not believe that NVIDIA's most recent drivers are responsible for the sudden performance improvements seen in these newer titles, we do think that NVIDIA is still directly responsible. There is little doubt in our minds that NVIDIA has had a helping hand in developing these recent popular gaming titles, and it would seem that their involvement has paid off. That alone already will give NVIDIA some edge over the competition by a better optimizations towards their products.

Perhaps AMD became too comfortable with the initial success of the Radeon HD 4800 series and did not expect NVIDIA to fight back so aggressively. Whatever the case, it is clear that what NVIDIA has been doing over the past few months has paid dividends. Certainly we never expected that by the end of 2008 it would be NVIDIA who possessed the most desirable mid-range performance part, but it appears that they do.