AMD, Nvidia Release 'Most Powerful' Graphics

On Thursday, both AMD and Nvidia released updates to their graphics cards, with AMD claiming to have the most powerful graphics chip in the world. According to testing from ExtremeTech, however, Nvidia's card is faster.

AMD released the Radeon HD 4890 reference card, which the company says will be priced at $249 by its fourteen or so partners, or $229 after a rebate. Nvidia countered with the GeForce GTX 275, which will be sold at about the same $250 street price.

Technically, both cards are extensions of existing architectures, although ATI is using a different ASIC for the 4890, simply rearranging the components to allow the chips to reach higher clock speeds.

Although both cards are powerhouses in and of themselves, the $250 price point is becoming more significant in a world where a new graphics card costs as much as a dedicated game console, PC gaming's chief competition. Both AMD and Nvidia have shifted away from monolithic graphics monstrosities into a business model that attempts to facilitate older integrated graphics to work together with a newer graphics card, and push PC gamers into buying one graphics card now, buying another later, and pairing them together to gain more performance.

"The ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card represents the AMD sweet spot strategy reloaded," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD, in a statement. "With last year's launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and ATI Radeon HD 4870 products, we gave gamers great performance and an incredible value proposition. Today, we're doing it again. ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics cards are incredible performers, priced to sell in all major markets worldwide."

Although AMD has publicly boasted of its transition to 40-nm process technologies and aggressively using new memory technologies, at Nvidia "we want to focus on things, more about what does the end user consumer care about?" said Ujesh Desai, the general manager of the GeForce product group at Nvidia, in a small press conference last week. The company will shift to the more aggressive technologies "when it makes sense," he said.

So who won the graphics shootout? According to an ExtremeTech review of the AMD Radeon HD 4890 and the Nvidia GeForce GTX 275, most likely Nvidia, by a nose. But the review also did not take into account what AMD claims is an extensive overclocking threshold, which OEMs and enthusiasts will take advantage of.

Below, ExtremeTech summarizes the new architectures:

	GeForce GTX 260 c216	GeForce GTX 275	Radeon HD 4870	Radeon HD 4890
Price	~$200	~$250	~$250	~$250
GPU	GT 200b	GT 200b	RV770	RV790
Manufacturing Process	65/55nm	55nm	55nm	55nm
Transistor Count	1.4 B	1.4 B	956 M	959 M
Core Clock	576 MHz	633 MHz	750 MHz	850 MHz
Stream Processor Clock	1.24 GHz	1.404 GHz	750 MHz	850 MHz
Memory Clock	2.0 GHz DDR	2.26 GHz DDR	1.8 GHz DDR	1.9 GHz DDR
Stream Processors	216	240	800	800
Texture Units	72	80	40	40
Render back end (ROPs)	28	28	16	16
Frame Buffer	896 MB	896 MB	1024 MB	1024 MB
Memory Interface	448 bits	448 bits	256 bits	256 bits
Memory Bandwidth	111.9 GB/sec	127 GB/sec	115.2 GB/sec	124.8 GB/sec