NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 465: Cheaper Isn’t Always Better
by Ryan Smith on May 31, 2010 3:26 AM ESTBattlefield: Bad Company 2
The latest game in the Battlefield series - Bad Company 2 - is another one of our new DX11 games and has been a smash hit at retail. It’s also surprisingly hard on our GPUs, enough so that we can say we found something that’s more demanding than Crysis. As BC2 doesn’t have a built-in benchmark or recording mode, here we take a FRAPS run of the jeep chase in the first act, which as an on-rails portion of the game provides very consistent results and a spectacle of explosions, trees, and more.
NVIDIA’s 257.15 drivers did a lot to improve Bad Company 2 performance, a very necessary thing given the GTX 400 series’ original poor showing at the game. As a result the gap is shorter than it once was, but the GTX 465 still takes it on the chin here. With an increase in resolution comes an increase in the gap between the GTX 465 and the 5850, starting at 9% and culminating at 23%. If NVIDIA can work a bit more out of their drivers the GTX 465 may close the gap at 1680, but it’s still going to be pretty far behind at any higher resolutions. NVIDIA does have an advantage here when it comes to image quality (specifically, anti-aliasing), which will jump in to with our comprehensive review of the 257.15 drivers later this week.
As for the GTX 470 versus the GTX 465, the GTX 465 stays within 78% and 84% of its bigger sibling.
Meanwhile the Waterfall benchmark repeats something we saw on our initial GTX 480 review: NVIDIA does better than AMD when it comes to minimum framerates. We’ve been able to rule out a Video RAM advantage here thanks in part to the use of 1GB of VRAM on the GTX 465, so we have to look elsewhere to explain this. At this point we believe we may be shader bound, which would be to the GTX 465’s advantage.
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multivac - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
also, you thanked Zotec at the endrscsr - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
I read earlier the GTX465 review at computerbase.de and the load temperatures and power are well of both GTX 465 are well below the GTX 470.could it be that there is something wrong with your GTX 465 or your GTX 470 has a particular low power draw?
Ryan Smith - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
It's always possible.The primary issue is that the quality of chips coming off of a wafer are going to be variable in the best of times, and TSMC's situation is not quite that good. So between any two cards there can be a lot of variability, which is hard to account for when we only have a handful of any given card.
I do not believe that our GTX 465 is "damaged" in any way. It functions just fine. But it consumes a lot of power, and it's hot. We may have simply received a card with a poorer-than-average GPU, which would color our results.
As for our GTX 470, looking at some of the other reviews of it, I don't believe it's particularly exceptional.
For anyone curious, under FurMark the fan on our 470 stabilizes at 76%. On the GTX 465 it stabilizes as 80%. This is the primary reason why our GTX 465 is louder than our 470.
CPUGuy - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
"I read earlier the GTX465 review at computerbase.de and the load temperatures and power are well of both GTX 465 are well below the GTX 470.could it be that there is something wrong with your GTX 465 or your GTX 470 has a particular low power draw?"
Perhaps they were given a different sample card? Ever thought of that? You folks have to remember that these are not retail cards.
CPUGuy - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
Why are you taking another review into consideration when they may have been given a different sample? I honestly don't think they had a retail version.MrSpadge - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
It's said somewhere in the article that nVidia is using different voltages for these chips. So there you have it: Anand tested one at the upper bound of the voltage range (a worse chip) whereas computerbase likely got one which was more in line with the voltage on the 470/480s.Yes, voltage can make such a difference in power draw.
tviceman - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
This review is sloppy and outright laughable at points. Although you state which Nvidia drivers used (3 of them) you clearly used different drivers and/or old benchmarks for the same game on many parts of the tests, despite the 257 drivers offering some noticeable across-the-board increases. Even if not by much, FPS scores should be slightly different and/or up. In some reviews, it was clear newer drivers were only used on certain cards as the gtx470 is way faster than the gtx480 at BFBC2. Nearly all the other benchmarks, though, have both cards scoring the exact same as they did at release.It's not an accurate, or credible, way to post a review. All tests should be done on the same configuration. same software, same hardware, same drivers. If you don't have time to rerun your gtx470/480 benchmarks with the latest drivers, then you should NOT include them in the review.
tviceman - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
And just to say, it's not that I disagree with your analysis on the gtx465, but if you are going to have huge graphs showing how all the cards perform and where they fit vs. their counterparts and rivals, those graphs need to be accurate and not using different configurations that will skew results.Ryan Smith - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
New drivers are always a thorny issue. In an ideal world I'd like to update our results with the latest drivers as they're released. But realistically it's 1-1.5 man-weeks of work to redo the entire benchmark suite and that's just not practical.As a result, for the most part we will keep the same results set for upwards of 6 months. If there's a significant change in performance due to a new driver we'll go ahead and rerun some numbers as necessary, which we have done for the 257.15 drivers. We will probably redo some more benchmarks, but it wasn't possible to get anything else done ahead of this review.
tviceman - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
Well I think it's only fair, proper, and balanced to run all the cards with the same configuration. If you're unable to do so in the time frame alloted, then only include the cards which are in immediate competition and add more later.The BFBC2 benchmark looks plain WRONG with the gtx470 trouncing the gtx480. And since other gtx470 scores were exactly the same as your original review, it just looks like you randomly picked a few small benchmarks to update with the latest drivers, and left the rest untouched.
It just isn't accurate.