For this review, we have updated our drivers for the ATI cards to the latest Catalyst 8.7 WHQL official drivers.

We ran into several problems with this set of drivers when running CrossFire on our pair of Radeon HD 4870 cards though, which is very frustrating. We got a few BSODs, a system that randomly locks-up and graphics corruption. Oops, looks like ATI has to go back to fix problems on their drivers once again.

You might wish to take a look at our Graphics Slugfest: ATI Radeon HD 4850 CF, HD 4870, HD 4870 CF vs. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260, GTX 280 article for scores gathered with the Catalyst 8.6 hotfix drivers if you would like to compare performance figures between the two sets of drivers.

The XFX GeForce GTX 280 1GB XXX puts out some nice scores over the default NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 reference card, but in both cases it is still nowhere near the results produced by the ATI Radeon HD 4870 in CrossFire.

NVIDIA just got demolished in this one. XFX's card makes a nice improvement over the reference GTX 280. Furthermore, it manages to squeeze past the ATI Radeon HD 4870 in CrossFire on just one run - 1680 x 1050 without AA/AF. However, NVIDIA was dusted right after that anyway.