Galaxy gt 250 video card benchmark upgrade#
Galaxy gt 250 video card benchmark full#

To demonstrate: I am writing this only 2 hours before the schedule NDA release of the GTS 250 and have received no less than four calls about pricing changes to these products. Thankfully, neither NVIDIA nor AMD really give a damn about our articles and tend to find ways to lower prices at the very last moment.

Galaxy gt 250 video card benchmark upgrade#

Users looking for an upgrade can take this opportunity to increase performance on an existing setup with a modest sub-$150 investment.Īll of our comparisons depend on the prices of each product to really be relevant. The fact that the GTS 250 512MB card (another option for AICs) can also run in SLI and 3-Way SLI with the existing 9800 GTX+ cards is another interesting addition to the equation. But together they might be enough for a shift to the green squad. On their own, those extras would likely not be enough to change anyone’s mind about which card to purchase, all else being equal. PhysX has some interesting qualities, but Mirror’s Edge will only hold interesting for so long. The primary CUDA application use, video transcoding, is a popular category and definitely fast but not without faults. While I absolutely loved my time with 3D Vision, very few people are going to be willing to upgrade their monitor for it. The value of these extras is very specific and individual and often debatable. If you purchase and NVIDIA solution you do get the addition of support for CUDA, PhysX and 3D Vision for GeForce technologies. One area NVIDIA continues to push, and rightfully so, is on the side of features and extras. Sadly, even though the performance gaps between the GTS 250 and HD 4870 512MB card do lessen as the resolution increases, very few gamers are going to care as gamers with $149 GPUs rarely have 30″ 2560×1600 displays. In fact, the only title that NVIDIA’s offering shows any kind of spark is on Far Cry 2 where both AMD cards simply choke. You might be able to guess then how the GTS 250 fares against the Radeon HD 4870: not that well. Our two newest gaming tests though, Far Cry 2 and Left 4 Dead, did show a noticeable performance advantage for the new GTS 250 card across the range of resolutions. The Radeon HD 4850 512MB was actually surprisingly competitive with the GTS 250 1GB in titles like World in Conflict, Call of Duty: World at War and even Crysis! At the lower and upper resolutions the two cards are within a few frames per second of each other. The more important comparisons obviously come when we look at the Radeon cards that we used in our benchmarks. In a couple of tests the 20×15 and 25×16 resolutions increased SLIGHTLY though I don’t think a $149 graphics card will be the target for a user with a 30″ display like that. Yes, in Far Cry 2 we did see a noticeable gain in performance on the GTS 250 when compared to the 9800 GTX+ but that was basically it. While at first that might seem to be an obvious conclusion, we were still hoping that the move from 512MB of memory to 1GB would result in SOMETHING. In fact, the HD 4870 512MB uses 56 watts additional power (22% more total system power) while playing Crysis.įirst, the obvious: the GeForce GTS 250 and GeForce 9800 GTX+ graphics cards perform basically identically to each other.

Galaxy gt 250 video card benchmark full#

One thing the GTS 250 can be proud of its power consumption – it uses the least power at BOTH idle and under a full load.