NVIDIA's 180 driver speeds up GTX 260+ to make it FASTER than 4870

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shadow2get

In the zone
The upcoming 180 driver release from Nvidia allows the Geforce GTX 260 with 216 Shaders to overake the Radeon HD 4870 in top titles like Call of Duty 5, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Left for Dead and Dead Space. Nvidia's new driver is set to launch this week and it will also bring some more functionality.

The first benchmarks will be revealed today, while the driver will hit the market shortly after. This is Nvidia's three month plus effort to fight against the sucessfull Radeon HD 4870 from AMD and with a new driver things will start to look good for Nvidia.

This driver will be the right time for Nvidia to relaunch the Geforce GTX 260 with 216 Shaders and try to fight AMD for the performance crown. We should have a few numbers for you shortly, so stay tuned.
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shadow2get

In the zone
GTX 260+ with new driver leaves 4870 beaten and scarred.

BAD NEWS for all ATI 4870 users who were boasting of the performance wrt GTX 260 / GTX 260+.

Check this UPDATE :
GTX 260+ with new driver leaves 4870 beaten and scarred.

Review Part 1: We played some hot games
Nvidia's GT200 series has had quite a rough ride since its introduction several months ago. First of all, it failed to hold its ground against ATI's RV770-based products. The GTX 260 with 192 shaders was slower than an HD4870, while the GTX 280 couldn't match the performance of ATI's dual-GPU HD 4870 X2. Apart from less than stellar performance, there was the question of the rather high price. Just weeks after launch Nvidia dropped prices significantly, but a bitter taste still remained, especially if you were one of the early adopters.

In the meantime, some things have changed for the better. An improved version of the GTX260 was introduced, featuring 216 cores instead of 192 on the original design, and more importantly GT200 prices have dropped significantly and ATI's price/performance lead has been compromised. The latest good news for Nvidia comes in the form of a driver, the 180.47, and this is what we'll be playing around with today.

In part two of our review, we'll take a closer look at the performance increases over the previous driver versions, but today we're letting it loose against ATI, Gainward's HD 4870 Golden Sample with 1GB of memory to be exact. Nvidia's honor was defended by EVGA's overclocked GTX 260 Core 216 SSC and a reference card. It has to be said that Gainward's card is feature-packed compared to Nvidia's cards, as it boasts HDMI and DisplayPort. However, Gainward's card is also a bit pricier than a plain HD4870, but it's overclocked and features those useful connectors which are often forgotten for the sake of achieving a marginally lower retail price.

We tested the new driver with the hottest holiday games out there, at least according to Nvidia. The illustrious five are: FarCry 2, Dead Space, Fallout 3, Call of Duty World at War and Left 4 Dead. Unfortunately, we didn't manage to get a copy of Left 4 Dead in time for our test, but four games are more than enough to give us a clear picture of the performance boost provided by the new driver.

Testbed

Motherboard: MSI P45D3 Platinum ( Provided by: MSI );
Processor: Intel Core 2 QX9770 Extreme edition at 3.6GHz ( Provided by: Intel );
Memory: Corsair Dominator 12800 7-7-7-24 ( Provided by: Corsair);
HDD: WD VelociRaptor 300G 10,000RPM ( Provided by: SmoothCreation );

SOME of the benchmarks in the res of 1920x1200:

*www.fudzilla.com/images/stories/2008/November/Reviews/farcry1.jpg
*www.fudzilla.com/images/stories/2008/November/Reviews/farcry2.jpg

Deadspace
*www.fudzilla.com/images/stories/2008/November/Reviews/deadspace.jpg

Fallout 3
*www.fudzilla.com/images/stories/2008/November/Reviews/fallout.jpg

Call of Duty: World at War
*www.fudzilla.com/images/stories/2008/November/Reviews/callofduty.jpg

Company Of Heroes
*www.fudzilla.com/images/stories/2008/November/Reviews/coh2.jpg

*www.fudzilla.com/images/stories/2008/November/Reviews/crysis3.jpg
*www.fudzilla.com/images/stories/2008/November/Reviews/crysis4.jpg
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More Benchies HERE
 
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shadow2get

In the zone
Another UPDATE :

For ATI 4870 users:
ATI to respond with a performance driver


*www.fudzilla.com/images/stories/Logos/atin.jpg

It’s not over, yet
We've learned that within two to three weeks' time, ATI might have a new driver to counter Nvidia's 180 series.

Nvidia’s 180 driver ends up significantly faster than ATI’s Radeon HD 4870 in top five, Nvidia picked games; but we’ve learned that the new Catalyst should get Radeon HD 4870 back in the game.

The upsetting part is that both companies took months after the release to release a proper driver for their cards and it looks that ATI has been holding back performance just in case Nvidia comes back, or it simply took them more than three months to solve their original problems.

Either way, it is not something to be proud of, but the end users will get more performance out of their chips, eventually.
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shadow2get

In the zone
Oops, forgot to add the link. Here is the source: ATI to respond with a performance driver

More updates on the ATI Drivers:
ATI's new driver comes on December 10th
*www.fudzilla.com/images/stories/Logos/ati8.jpg

ATI HD 4870 comeback?

The new ATI Catalyst driver 8.12 should be available on December 10th and it will bring optimization for the titles that Nvidia has a right to gloat about.

We managed to find out that some of these optimizations are also going to wait for the next Catalyst 9.1 which should probably come sometime next year. The optimizations are going to influence both single board and CrossFire configurations and the only issue is the titles for which Nvidia apparently had more time to optimize than ATI.

Nvidia's GTX 260 216 currently beats ATI in Call of Duty 5, Dead Space, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2 and Left 4 Dead, and these are five titles that Nvidia likes. According to our info, the GTX 260 216, at least the overclocked one from EVGA, outperforms HD 4870 by up to 67 percent, in Dead Space at least. In Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3 the gap is much smaller, as GTX 260 216 is 22 and 10 percent faster.

All of this means that ATI will certainly be back with its HD 4870 card, but the performance increase is still unknown, as the 8.12 is still not available for beta testing, but we will get back to you as soon as we manage to get some new info.
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4T7

4T7

Journeyman
Wait till dec 10
Code: 
*www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10575&Itemid=34
 
Psychosocial

Psychosocial

Violent serenity.
GeForce strikes back! Kill ATi... oops, spilled a little fanboi beans :D. Well, nice to see this. Hope ATi does something (but from inside, I hope they DONT :D).
 
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