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

DIRT 2

Codemasters latest racing game marks the return of a racer to our benchmark suite. As the first DX11 racer, DIRT 2 makes pretty through use of the DX11’s tessellation abilities, not to mention being the best looking racer we have ever seen.

DIRT 2 was a game the earlier members of the GTX 400 series did fairly well at. However for some reason that goes out the window on the GTX 465, as a near-parity performance at 1680 becomes a 20% deficit at 2560. At 1920 (which we would consider the sweet-spot for this card) it falls behind by 10%. As far as we can tell, the Radeon 5000 series scales better with resolution on this game than the GTX 400 series does, and while this wasn’t too bad for NVIDIA since the GTX 470 started out  well enough, starting out at near-parity for the GTX 465 only means things get worse.

Meanwhile getting back to our GTX 465/470 comparison, the gap remains constant – the GTX 465 falls behind by roughly 20%.