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

Left 4 Dead

Introduced in 2004, Valve’s Source engine continues to live on in new Valve games. At this point even newer Source games like Left 4 Dead are rarely GPU limited to a significant degree, but we keep it on here due to the fact that we’re expecting at least one more Source game this year in Portal 2.

Left 4 Dead is not a game that favors the Fermi architecture, and this becomes all too clear with the GTX 465. At 1680 it falls behind by 10%, and at 2560 that increases to 30%. Notably this is our only game with 8x anti-aliasing, but as we saw in our GTX 480 review GF100 is no worse than AMD’s Cypress when it comes to 8x AA, so something else is the culprit. It could the lack of ROPs, but we’re also not willing to throw out the idea that it’s a texture filtering limitation.

Meanwhile we have something else interesting going on with the GTX 465: it’s not just losing to AMD’s cards. The GTX 465 ends up losing to the GTX 285 here, and even the GTX 275. Compared to the GTX 285 the GTX 465 is around 10% slower, which is quite surprising since we did not expect the GTX 285 to score any notable wins today. With L4D being fairly light on shader use, this leads us once more to the ROPs or texture units. Unless there’s an edge-case where the GTX 465 is slower than the linear difference between the two cards’ ROPs, the ROPs alone can’t explain this difference. The texture filtering difference between the two cards could explain this though.