The Radeon HD 4870 (512MB) was launched right around the same time as the GeForce GTX 260, some five months ago now. The Radeon HD 4870 delivered a similar level of performance at a significantly lower price tag, making it the more attractive option. Therefore Nvidia was forced to lower the MSRP from $450 US before launch day to $400 US once released.

However this was not enough to compete with the Radeon HD 4870 which was selling for just $300 US, and therefore Nvidia finally ended up matching the $300 US price tag, after a few months. Still, even at roughly the same price, the GeForce GTX 260 was simply an alternative and there was no real need to push aside the Radeon HD 4870.

So at roughly the same price the GeForce GTX 260 was now competitive with the Radeon HD 4870, delivering better performance in some games while falling short in others. The problem was, by this stage everyone was jumping up and down about the Radeon HD 4870 and few buyers were even considering the GeForce GTX 260.

This was obviously quite a large problem for Nvidia and they needed to do something quickly if they wanted to secure a lot more sales. Therefore, they tweaked the GeForce GTX 260 and re-released it as the GeForce GTX 260, confusing right. The new version was the same in just about every way, but while the original version featured 192 SPUs (Stream Processing Units), the new version was upgraded to 216 SPUs.

The end result was more performance, around 10% more performance on average. This meant that in games where the GeForce GTX 260 was already faster than the Radeon HD 4870, it was now much faster. It also meant that in games were the two delivered similar performance, the GeForce GTX 260 was now out right faster, and in the few games where it was slower, the margin had been drastically reduced.

However while all this was happening, Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards outfitted with 1GB of memory rather than just 512MB were starting to become much more common. Furthermore, they were matching the price of the new GeForce GTX 260 (216SP) graphics cards and also offered a slight performance boost over the 512MB version. So really, much has changed since we first reviewed the Radeon HD 4870 and GeForce GTX 260 graphics cards, and therefore our original verdict is probably no longer valid.

Furthermore, while these two graphics cards have changed quite a bit over the past 5 months, so too have the games. In fact, just recently we have had an impressive lineup of new games being released which included Far Cry 2, Call of Duty 5 – World at War, Dead Space, Sacred 2, Fallout 3, and Left 4 Dead. The problem here for the Radeon HD 4870 is that the GeForce GTX 260 has proven to be faster in all of the games just mentioned, and it is quite a bit faster too.

This caused a number of people to get all excited about the latest Nvidia Forceware driver release, claiming that this was how the GeForce GTX 260 mounted its amazing comeback. Therefore last week we compared the latest Forceware driver with a four month old version in a range of games, and the difference, well there was none. So is the GeForce GTX 260 (216SP) now faster than the Radeon HD 4870 (1GB) in everything, or just in the recently released games that Nvidia is pushing as if they were their own?