This week a brand new battle will erupt between two new mainstream performance competitors, as ATI preps their Radeon HD 4890 and Nvidia counters with the GeForce GTX 275. These new graphics cards are set to cost around $250 US, and at that price they should offer an impressive level of performance. The only question now is which delivers the best performance?

The Radeon HD 4870 has always been the king of value, not performance, and with 1GB cards selling for as little as $190 US, this has never been truer. The Radeon HD 4890 threatens the great value of the Radeon HD 4800 series, as it delivered just 5-6% more performance while priced at around 25% more. It was disappointing to find that in so many tests the Radeon HD 4890 was just a few frames per second faster than the original.