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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GeorgeH - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
I actually think it should be called a 460. People with a reasonable amount of tech knowledge are going to know the difference, and people without it are already trained to think that a bigger RAM number is always better (see the tons of "bargain" cards with 1GB+ of slow DDR.)Basically, the performance differential here is already clear from the full product name, and we have one fewer model number muddying a GPU market already overflowing with a ridiculous amount of model names that have identical, nearly identical, or completely misleading performance capabilities relative to other model names.
Daeros - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
I would agree with you except for the common practice of mfg's doubling up on VRAM. When that happens, there will be 768MB, 1GB, 1.5GB, and 2GB versions, and people will have no idea the 1.5GB will probably be slower than the 1GB version.tigersty1e - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
This line made me read it twice."This in turn means the blades of the fan sit at the same height as the lip, blocking direct airflow out the back. With this design the card is still exhausting at least some air out of the rear of the card, but it shouldn’t be as much as a fully-open card such as our custom Asus GTX 460."
rear and back are the same thing. I think you meant to say the the cover blocks direct airflow out the front.
Ryan Smith - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
I define the front of the card to be the side with the display ports, so the cover blocks airflow out of the opposite end, the back.fausto412 - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
While a very nice card...too little too late...i got a 5870 3 weeks ago. if you have a high end quad core and want to play BFBC2 in the highest settings only a gtx480 or 5870 will do. i chose the cheaper, cooler and more efficient card.kumquatsrus - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
or gtx 460 in sli for less?Jamahl - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
Yeah look around, not just at Anand's flawed benches.TPU shows sli 460's losing to the 5970 by 20% at 1680 and 1920, and a massive 30% at 2560.
They aren't even close, but keep dreaming anyway.
DominionSeraph - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
The reply was to a 5870, not 5970. Just a matter of $300 difference between the two.DrMrLordX - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
On your power consumption + noise charts (at the very least), the Zotac card's results are shown with white text superimposed over a yellow bar on the graph. This makes the white text almost completely unreadable. One can guess at the numbers based on context, but still . . .bobjones32 - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
The benchmarks look good at first look, but then I realized I purchased my current 4870 for $150 nearly a year and a half ago.Looking more closely at these benchmarks, the GTX 460 beats the 4870 in most tests, but not by that much, and at lower resolutions the 4870 actually wins.
Shouldn't it be clear-cut that a $200 brand new card from today destroys a $150 card from nearly a year and a half ago?