NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 460: The $200 King

BattleForge: DX10

Up next is BattleForge, Electronic Arts’ free to play online RTS. As far as RTSes go this game can be quite demanding, and this is just at DX10.

BattleForge switches things up some. No longer are we RAM/L2/ROP dependent as much as we are on raw shader power. This gives the 1GB GTX 460 only the slightest advantage over the 768MB card, while the factory overclocked cards clearly dominate here.

This also gives us a situation where we can gauge the GTX 460 and GTX 465 in a shader-bound test and see just how well the GTX 460 can do. The result in the favor of the GTX 465 by quite a bit, where it beats the 1GB GTX 460 by nearly 15%. With the need to extract ILP from the GF104 GPU to fully utilize the GPU’s CUDA cores, this looks to be approaching a worst-case scenario for the GTX 460, as it even falls behind last year’s GTX 275 and Radeon HD 4890.

As for the Radeon 5000 series, AMD’s situation improves here. The 5830 still loses, but only by 10%. Meanwhile the 5850 pulls ahead of the 1GB GTX 460 by 18%.