Although the GeForce GTS 250 SLI tandem has the best average speed in three out of the four resolutions, being especially faster than the GeForce GTX 285 and Radeon HD 4850 X2 at 1280x1024. However, its bottom speed is no higher than 20fps. In other words, the SLI tandem cannot ensure smooth gameplay in every scene, even though is close to doing that.

Take note that the gap between the GeForce GTS 250 SLI and Radeon HD 4850 X2 shrinks from 25% to 8% as the resolution grows up, and the dual-chip card from ATI is even ahead at 2560x1600.

Nvidia Geforce GTS 250 specifications and features

CUDA Cores	128
Graphics Clock (MHz)	738 MHz
Processor Clock (MHz)	1836 MHz
Texture Fill Rate (billion/sec)	47.2

Memory Clock (MHz)	1100
Standard Memory Config	512MB or 1 GB GDDR3
Memory Interface Width	256-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)	70.4

NVIDIA SLI®-ready*	2-way/3-Way
GeForce 3D Vision Ready
NVIDIA PureVideo® Technology*	HD
NVIDIA PhysX™-ready	*
NVIDIA CUDA™ Technology
Microsoft DirectX	10
OpenGL	3.0
Certified for Windows Vista

GTX 285 specifications and features
Experience the hottest games at mind blowing frame rates, or go beyond traditional 3D graphics with Graphics Plus™ and experience GPU-accelerated NVIDIA® PhysX™ gaming effects, Stereoscopic 3D, and lightning fast video and image processing.

© 2008 EA Digital Illusions CE AB. Mirror’s Edge and the DICE logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of EA Digital Illusions CE AB. All Rights Reserved. EA and the EA logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Go Beyond HD ! Take your DirectX® 10 gaming beyond HD, with the power of GeForce GTX 285 GPUs. Place yourself in the center of the action and experience true DirectX 10 gaming cinema in extreme HD (2560x1600) resolutions—all enabled by GeForce 200 Series’ second generation unified architecture, NVIDIA® SLI® technology, and incredible performance in the latest games including Far Cry 2, Mirrors Edge, and Call of Duty 5: World at War. With up to 50% more performance than prior generation GPUs, GeForce GTX 285 GPUs tear through complex DirectX 10 environments and cinematic effects at blazing frame rates in extreme HD resolutions.

CUDA Cores	240
Graphics Clock (MHz)	648 MHz
Processor Clock (MHz)	1476 MHz
Texture Fill Rate (billion/sec)	51.8

Memory Clock (MHz)	1242
Standard Memory Config	1  GB GDDR3
Memory Interface Width	512-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)	159.0

NVIDIA SLI®-ready*	2-way/3-Way
GeForce 3D Vision Ready
NVIDIA PureVideo® Technology*	HD
NVIDIA PhysX™-ready	*
NVIDIA CUDA™ Technology
Microsoft DirectX	10
OpenGL	2.1
Certified for Windows Vista

HD4870  Features & Benefits
Specifications :
    * 956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
    * PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
    * 256-bit GDDR3/4/5 memory interface
    * Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
          o Shader Model 4.1
          o 32-bit floating point texture filtering
          o Indexed cube map arrays
          o Independent blend modes per render target
          o Pixel coverage sample masking
          o Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
          o Gather4 texture fetching
    * Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
          o 800 stream processing units
                + Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
                + Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
                + Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
          o 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
          o Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
          o Shader instruction and constant caches
          o Up to 160 texture fetches per clock cycle
          o Up to 128 textures per pixel
          o Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
          o DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
          o High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
          o Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
          o Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
          o Re-Z, and Z Range optimization
          o Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
          o Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
          o Up to 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing
          o Accelerated physics processing
    * Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
          o High performance vertex cache
          o Programmable tessellation unit
          o Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
          o Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
    * Anti-aliasing features
          o Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
          o Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
          o Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
          o Gamma correct
          o Super AA (ATI CrossFireX™ configurations only)
          o All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
    * Texture filtering features
          o 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
          o 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
          o sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
          o Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
          o Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
          o Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
    * OpenGL 3.1 support
    * ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform6
          o Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for H.264/AVC, VC-1, and MPEG-2 video formats
                + High definition (HD) playback of Blu-ray and HD DVD video
                + Dual stream (HD+SD) playback support
                + DirectX Video Acceleration 1.0 & 2.0 support
                + Support for BD-Live certified applications
          o Hardware DivX and MPEG-1 video decode acceleration
          o Accelerated video transcoding & encoding for H.264 and MPEG-2 formats
          o ATI Avivo Video Post Processor6