Conclusion

It’s been a pretty hectic two weeks testing GPUs here at FiringSquad. Since taking an early performance look at the GTX 295 on December 18th, both ATI and NVIDIA have submitted new drivers designed to improve their performance in comparison to the competition. We have a strong suspicion this back and forth battle of the rival driver teams is going to continue to play itself out over the course of the next several weeks, if not longer. This makes coming to final conclusions today on the ultimate performance of GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2 extremely difficult.

What we can tell you is that NVIDIA has a definite lead in Dead Space. Games based on the Call of Duty 4 game engine have also run faster with GTX 295 in our testing. Finally NVIDIA also enjoys a strong performance lead in Far Cry 2.

Falling in the lean NVIDIA category are Crysis and Fallout 3. Fallout 3’s performance is largely CPU-bound, but at 2560x1600 the GTX 295 managed to pull ahead of the 4870 X2 by 7%. The GTX 295 put up a good showing in our early Crysis tests, but ATI managed to pull even by 2560x1600 with very high graphics settings and 2xAA. There are also a couple of outstanding performance bugs for NVIDIA in this game, so it’s probably too soon to come to any definitive conclusions on Crysis performance.

BioShock was the one title where the 4870 X2 excelled, outrunning the GTX 295 by anywhere from 4-20% in BioShock, while L4D falls in the lean ATI category, with 4870 X2 running 6-8% faster than GTX 295.

For now we’re going to put STALKER in the toss-up category, but we still have a lot more testing we’d like to do with this game at the higher graphics quality settings. When we first tested this game a few months ago it really brought both ATI and NVIDIA GPUs to their knees. Thanks to recent driver improvements though things have changed significantly and it looks like we may be able to crank the settings up slightly more, perhaps even with a little bit of AA. We’ll have to wait for the benchmarks to come in first though.

Ultimately we have a feeling that picking between the GTX 295 and 4870 X2 would be akin to picking between two different Ferraris. Each is crazy fast and exotic with their own areas of strengths/weaknesses. But like the Ferraris, either card will definitely put a grin on your face. Right now though NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 295 is the Enzo Ferrari of the bunch. The GTX 295 is simply the faster card overall at this point.

The most intriguing move of the past 24 hours is ATI’s counter to the GTX 295. ATI is working with board partners and retailers on a 4870 X2 price cut. So far only one board partner, and one retailer have gotten onboard with the plan, with Sapphire’s 4870 X2 board selling for $450 on Newegg, plus a $50 mail-in rebate bringing the price down to $400. If ATI can get more board partners and retailers to play along with this price, they could have quite a coup on their hands, leading to more price cuts from NVIDIA.

Thanks to its slightly higher clocks, EVGA’s GeForce GTX 295 Plus is well positioned, regardless of what ultimately ends up happening. Because EVGA is pricing their board at NVIDIA’s MSRP, you’re essentially getting a free performance boost. And if NVIDIA happens to reduce the price on the GTX 295 in a few weeks, EVGA will obviously match the reduction. We’re crossing our fingers for a GTX 295 Superclocked though!