Installation, Testing and Comparison
Well I thought the 4870 was a big card, but the GTX260 is larger in both length and height. Here’s a few pictures of the Calibre GTX260 with the ECS GTS250, Sapphire 4870 512mb, and Diamond 4870 1gig cards for comparison:
Here it is installed in my system powering a 22” LCD with the GTS250 running as a secondary card powering dual 20” LCD monitors and an 8600GTS for PhysX. The GTX260 almost takes up three slots really, the 8600GTS is actually touching the GTX260, but it’s only plastic housing so I’m not too worried about it and the fan on the GTX260 is clear as well.
So let’s test it out…
First up we’ve got the old standby 3dMark06:
Clearly the GTX260 outperforms the 4870.
Next up is 3DMark Vantage with the Preset on High:
The GTX260 again is the clear winner.
The next test is Crysis Warhead.
- Resolution: 1680×1050
- 2x AA
- Gamer Settings
- DX10
- 3 runs averaged out
Here we see similar performance for the average frame rates of the 4870 and the GTX260, but we see a higher maximum frame rate with the GTX260, and a lower minimum frame rate than the 4870.
The last three tests are using SiSoft Sandra 2009 SP3.
First is SiSoft Sandra, Graphic Processing Benchmark.
Graphics (GPGPU) Processing
Benchmark the graphics performance of the graphics processors (GPGPUs).
Such operations are used by specialised software, e.g. scientific software, image manipulation, video decoders/encoders, games that make GPU performance pretty important.
ResultsInterpretation
Processing Float (Pixels/s) – higher results are better, i.e. better single (32-bit) floating-point performance.
Processing Double (Pixels/s) – higher results are better, i.e. better double (64-bit) floating-point performance.
Here we actually see the 4870 coming out ahead, why I’m not too sure, I expected the GTX260 to dominate in all testing.
Next test is using SiSoft Sandra 2009 SP3 Graphics Memory Bandwidth benchmark.
Graphics (GPGPU) Bandwidth
Benchmark the bandwidth of the memory of the graphics processors (GPGPUs) and the bandwidth of the bus that connects them to your computer.
The speed at which the data can be sent to the GPGPUs, internally processed and the results sent back is as important as the processing power of the GPGPUs. The benchmark is based on the well-known STREAM memory benchmark, as implemented by the CPU memory benchmarks.
Results Interpretation
Internal Memory Bandwidth (MB/s) – higher results are better, i.e. faster internal memory bandwidth.
Data Transfer Bandwidth (MB/s) – higher results are better, i.e. faster data transfer between the GPU and computer.
Now we see the GTX260 leading by a wide margin in this test, which is surprising since the 4870 uses DDR5 and the GTX260 uses DDR3. You would think the DDR5 would perform better right?
The final test I’ve got is from SiSoft Sandra again, this one is the Video Rendering benchmark.
Video Rendering
Benchmark the graphics performance of the video adapters (GFXs).
Such operations are used by all graphics software, image manipulation, video decoders/encoders, games and modern operating systems.
Results Interpretation
Float Shaders (Pixels/s) – higher results are better, i.e. better single (32-bit) floating-point performance.
Double Shaders (Pixels/s) – higher results are better, i.e. better double (64-bit) floating-point performance.
Here again the GTX260 dominates the 4870, even the GTS250 beats the 4870 in two out of the three results.
The fan on the GTX260 is nice and quiet under load, something that I can truly appreciate, I do not like a loud computer at all.
Using the Calibre GTX260 for playing games it did seem smoother overall, and the images are bit better really. There didn’t seem to be much of a difference when watching movies though, they seemed about the same for that.
I used Crysis Warhead for the ‘real world’ testing above, but I’ve also got many other games, and I ran FRAPS while playing many of them to see any differences. I played Fallout3, Darkest of Days, Dead Space, Far Cry 2, Left4Dead and Call of Duty: World at War and in all instances the GTX260 outperformed the 4870 by 5-15% depending on the game played.