What's New?

To NVIDIA's credit, the rebranding exercise comes with a price reduction. They dropped the price of the 512MB model to US$129 and introduced a new 1GB model at the original price point of US$149. Essentially, you get a free 512MB graphics memory upgrade with the new GeForce GTS 250. This is great for those who cannot afford the newer GeForce GTX cards which are priced above US$200.

With that said, the new GeForce GTS 250 does have some new features. As mentioned above, it is now available with 1GB of memory. In addition, it is slightly shorter at 9", instead of the usual 10.5". It also uses just one 6-pin PCI Express power cable, instead of two. So it is an improved version of the GeForce 9800 GTX+.

Is It Faster?

Well, logically, the 512MB version of the GeForce GTS 250 should perform similarly to the GeForce 9800 GTX+ since they are really the same card (with some minor exceptions). However, NVIDIA claims the new 1GB model to be superior to the ATI Radeon HD 4850. Let's take a look at some performance results that they provided during the concall.

In the first chart below, they compared the GeForce GTS 250 against the Radeon HD 4850 using games released in 2008. It shows the GeForce GTS 250 markedly superior to the Radeon HD 4850. To be fair to the Radeon HD 4850, the test results (e.g. Mirror's Edge) are affected by the GeForce GTS 250's support for PhysX.

In the second chart above, NVIDIA compared the performance of launch day drivers to show just how unprepared ATI is when it comes to delivering good drivers on launch day. They used SLI and CrossFire scaling as an example. We should remind you though that the GeForce GTS 250 is actually not a new card. Its actual launch day was over half a year ago, on July 29, 2008.

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