There has been a lot of focus on the ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB delivering performance that is rather close to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB for 'a fraction of the cost' when the GeForce GTX 280 was still retailing at a sky-high price. The GeForce GTX 260 896MB was completely forgotten because of its equally poor pricing and was written off before it was put to the test.

The Futuremark 3DMark Vantage results were pretty much expected, with the CrossFire setups producing scores higher than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB.

Interestingly, the GeForce GTX 260 896MB pulls ahead of the Radeon HD 4870 512MB in 3DMark Vantage's Extreme preset. The Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire setup returns some impressive scores, but when comparing a single HD 4870 to a GTX 280, it runs quite short of steam.

In our revamped Enemy Territory: Quake Wars benchmark, the GeForce GTX 260 896MB has the upper hand over the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, running at least ten frames per second more across all resolutions. The GeForce GTX 280 1GB steers clear of these two cards, posting a much higher result, but it was easily overrun by the ATI CrossFire setups.

When AA and AF was introduced, the GeForce GTX 260 takes a more serious performance hit compared to the Radeon HD 4870. Frame rates for these two cards are almost the same. If you noticed, the Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire setup is giving close to a 100% boost in performance over a single HD 4870, which is very evident in this AA and AF test...