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
Crysis: Warhead
Kicking things off as always is Crysis: Warhead, still the toughest game in our benchmark suite.Even 2 years since the release of the original Crysis, “but can it run Crysis?” is still an important question.
Crysis can be particularly memory-dependent, which in this case highlights the difference between the 768MB and 1GB GTX 460. 2560x1600 is not a viable option on the 768MB card here (or in most other games) due to the lack of VRAM, while at lower resolutions we can still clearly see the impact of having less RAM, less L2 cache, and less ROP power. At both 1680 and 1920, the 1GB GTX 460 is roughly 10% faster than the 768MB card. This much less than the 33% lead the 1GB GTX 460 has in terms of RAM/L2/ROP, but it’s still clear that there is a price to pay on the 768MB GTX 460.
Meanwhile the Radeon 5830 - already a hobbled card due to having half the ROPs of a full Radeon HD 5870 – takes a hard loss here. The 768MB GTX 460 comes ahead at 1920 by roughly 14% even with its RAM disadvantage. AMD definitely has their work cut out for them. As for the Radeon 5850, the 1GB GTX 460 trails right behind it until we hit 2560, where AMD’s continued advantage at high resolutions helps the card pull away some.
Looking at the minimum framerates, the difference in RAM/L2/ROPs becomes more pronounced. Here the 1GB GTX 460 has a 15% advantage at 1920, and strangely enough even beats a 5850 here. With the greater overhead of SLI this becomes even more of an issue, with our ragtag SLI set of 1GB GTX 460s beats our pair of factory overclocked EVGA 768MB GTX 460s by 33%. Finally the 5830 fares even worse, losing to the 768MB GTX 460 by 35%. In Crysis there is no substitute for more RAM and more ROPs.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
93 Comments
View All Comments
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...