Mass Effect 2

Electronic Arts’ recently released space-faring RPG is our new Unreal Engine 3 game. While it doesn’t have a built in benchmark, it does let us force anti-aliasing through driver control panels, giving us a better idea of UE3’s performance at higher quality settings. Since we can’t use a recording/benchmark in ME2, we use FRAPS to record a short run.

Mass Effect 2 was not a game the GTX 470 did particularly well at in the first place, so it should come as little surprise that the GTX 465 fares worse. The performance gap between it and the 5850 fluctuates some, but ultimately it’s around 20%. Interestingly enough, the gap between the GTX 465 and the GTX 470 fluctuates even more, with the deficit peaking at 1680 and shrinking to its lowest point at 1920.

Meanwhile we once again see the GTX 285 pull ahead of the GTX 465 in a game, and this time it’s even worse. The GTX 465 starts behind by 25% at 1680, and closes the gap to just 15% at 2560. Unlike Left 4 Dead, Mass Effect 2 is not a particularly easy game to render, so this isn’t just a case of the GTX 465 trailing with lighter games. Perhaps it’s optimization issues or perhaps it’s those texture filtering units, but the GTX 465 is definitely lacking something compared to the GTX 285.

DIRT 2 Wolfenstein
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  • poohbear - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link

    Why's the 5770 10fps slower than the 4870? is that a mistake? they perform on par especially w/ the recent driver updates for the 5770.
  • poohbear - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link

    in mass effect 2.:p hate the no edit feature!
  • Ryan Smith - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link

    There aren't any typos; those are the results we got for those cards on the 10.3a drivers.
  • temps - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link

    I can vouch for that. When my 1gb 4870 died, it was replaced with a 5770. In ME2, I saw a 10-15fps drop across the board with the same settings.. that didn't do it for me, so I ended up stepping up to a 5850.
  • BoFox - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

    Didn't you know that the 5770 is generally slower than 4870? The 4870 has far, far greater memory bandwidth despite a 100MHz lower core clock.
  • tno - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link

    I think a repost to the feed is appropriate when someone goes through this again and polishes it up. I couldn't finish the second paragraph it was so full or mistakes. Really guys there is no shame in hiring a copy editor.
  • softdrinkviking - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

    i don't care about typos in this kind of article.
    aside from problems with the numbers, i think everyone knows what is meant.

    i feel like it's expected that tech blog sites are littered with typos.

    actually, i'd like to hear about this from ryan smith or somebody here.

    do you guys want us to post typo corrections in the comments?

    i don't care, but what does anandtech want?
  • taltamir - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link

    Moving on to load temperatures, we can begin to see the price of using a GPU with a higher core voltage. Under Crysis that 2C advantage over the GTX 470 holds, with temperatures peaking at just 91C. This still makes it the 3rd hottest single-GPU card we have tested, tying with the Radeon HD 3870 and coming in 24C hotter than the 5850, a card it underperforms in this game.


    According to the graph, the GTX465 gets 89 C not 91 C.
  • taltamir - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link

    nevermind, I see now that there are two graphs, one for furmark and one for crysis.
  • multivac - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link

    NVIDIA filled in the first 2 spots in their lineup with the GTX 480 and GTX 480, with obvious room to grow out the family in the future.
    end of the first paragraph.
    still reading but im sure its a great article
    cheers!

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