NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 465: Cheaper Isn’t Always Better

STALKER: Call of Pripyat

The 3rd game in the STALKER series continues to build on GSC Game World’s X-Ray Engine by adding DX11 support, tessellation, and more. This also makes it another one of the highly demanding games in our benchmark suite.

At lower resolutions, the GTX 465 does consistently worse than the 5850 – at both 1680 and 1920 it’s 12% behind. What’s more interesting is that at 2560 the GTX 465 gets absolutely demolished – that’s not a typo, it really did get 4.7fps. Why? We know that Stalker loves VRAM, which is why 2GB Radeon cards and NVIDIA’s other GTX 400 series cards do so well. But with only 1GB the GTX 465 pays the price. As for why the price is so severe, AMD and NVIDIA use different memory management strategies, so AMD is likely using a strategy that handles texture swapping under Stalker better than NVIDIA does. As a result the 5850 can generally cope, while the GTX 465 chokes. Ultimately this is not a game the GTX 465 will ever be playing at 2560.