NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 460: The $200 King
by Ryan Smith on July 11, 2010 11:54 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- GeForce GTX 400
- GeForce GTX 460
- NVIDIA
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.
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Howard - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
What?Zok - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
Excellent writeup! I really enjoyed you going into depth on the architectural changes. I couldn't agree more that it's superb to see NVIDIA get back into the efficiency game - whether it be performance/price or performance/watt (and, by extension, temperature). Here's to hoping that AMD was sitting on something to combat this!P.S. Small typo: For everything but the high-end, this year is a feature yet and not a performance year.
thekimbobjones - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
Let the price war begin.homerdog - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
"Here we use the DX11 renderer and turn on self shadowing ambient occlusion (SSAO) to its highest setting, which uses a DX11 ComputeShader."I don't think that's what SSAO stands for. Sorry for the nitpick.
chizow - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
Yeah I believe the proper term is Screen Space Ambient Occlusion but self shadowing is how its often explained to give an idea of what it is.gentlearc - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
The graphs shown are leaving out too many new derivatives of cards, making is good for contrasting results, but poor for consistent data comparison. Conveniently left out are many cards in one graph that are in another. I'm disappointed in your presentation and find you've concentrated too much on the presentation of your article.Ryan Smith - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
Out of curiosity, what's not in our graphs that you'd like to see? At 2560 we run a limited number of cards because most cards are too slow to post a passable framerate, otherwise at 1920 and 1680 we have the complete 5700/5800/5900 series, GTX 400 series, GTX 200 series, and Radeon 4800 series, along with a 3870 and 8800GT. Is there something else you would like?SpaceRanger - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
What I'd like to see is the ATI card that is in direct competition with this highlighted as well. Having to search for the 5830 or 5850 out of all those bars turned me off.estaffer - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
need some cheese with your whine?SpaceRanger - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
Sure.. a good Gruyère please...