We choosed ATI Radeon HD 4870, which appeared in June 2008, and GeForce GTS 250 from the same summer, which was rebranded GeForce 9800 GTX +, which is, again, the same as the GeForce 8800 GTS, only manufactured in "tinier" technological process, enabling higher clocks for the GPU. However, we can't ignore the fact that this chip practically has two years of existence, and it's based on the architecture more than three years old. Yet this is a theme for anothery story, and we shall return to driver comparison.

Radeon on this test is signed by XFX, but the card is physically identical to AMD's reference model. It has 512 MB of video memory and the frequencies slightly raised for the GPU and memory (775 versus 750, and 3800 versus 3600 MHz respectively). GeForce card comes with a Zotac sticker: it's the AMP! Version, which also has slightly higher frequencies, and a whole gigabyte of video RAM. However, the purpose of this test is not to compare the speed of these cards  - Radeon was faster then and it's also faster now, and overclocked GeForce still doesn't have enought strength to come closer to AMD's former top model. The difference in the amount of video memory doesn't have much influence on the results, due to the resolution in which we tested (which is commonly used by buyers of these cards). Also, higher penalties are noticeably when the GeForcea is using antialiasing modes. It's the GPU's "fault" and 1 GB of video RAM can't help much.

Those familiar with graphics cards know that new drivers are always tweaked for the latest generation of graphics cards, as well for specific new games (this is done by both AMD and NVIDIA). The driver loads the appropriate profile of settings, based on the name EXE size through which the game is launched. For this reason, we used only the games that were available at the time of card' release, since the use of old drivers with new titles would probably produce disastrous results with improper difference (not to mention graphics bugs). We used Catalyst 8.6, which was released in June 2008, and ForceWare 182.06, which appeared several months later. Previous versions of ForceWare drivers refused to install on GTS 250, reporting the absence of compatible hardware. The INI file editing, to which we have resorted to many years ago when we wanted to change cards' IDs, was not possible because of the different format NVIDIA now uses.

As we mentioned, the GeForce had a good advantage at the moment because the drivers have already been well developed for this generation of GPUs. Radeon was not in that position because it was based on pretty revised architecture, compared to the previous series of cards, and AMD has since several times released drivers which have made a noticeable performance gains in popular games.