NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 460: The $200 King

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 next year’s in Portal 2.

Without much of a reliance on GPUs to speak of, our cards can do little to separate themselves here. The advantages of the 1GB GTX 460 are more or less lost, and overclocking doesn’t do a great deal to separate things either. With the launch of the GTX 465 we speculated that it was held back by a lack of texturing capabilities, and these results seem to support that position, with the GTX 465 falling behind the pack by a few percent.

However this is really a game that does better under AMD’s cards. The 5830 springs to life here in a dead-heat with both GTX 460 cards, while the 5850 shoots well ahead.  The GTX 460 would seem to do better on shader-heavy games than the 5830.