NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 465: Cheaper Isn’t Always Better
by Ryan Smith on May 31, 2010 3:26 AM ESTLeft 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 this year in Portal 2.
Left 4 Dead is not a game that favors the Fermi architecture, and this becomes all too clear with the GTX 465. At 1680 it falls behind by 10%, and at 2560 that increases to 30%. Notably this is our only game with 8x anti-aliasing, but as we saw in our GTX 480 review GF100 is no worse than AMD’s Cypress when it comes to 8x AA, so something else is the culprit. It could the lack of ROPs, but we’re also not willing to throw out the idea that it’s a texture filtering limitation.
Meanwhile we have something else interesting going on with the GTX 465: it’s not just losing to AMD’s cards. The GTX 465 ends up losing to the GTX 285 here, and even the GTX 275. Compared to the GTX 285 the GTX 465 is around 10% slower, which is quite surprising since we did not expect the GTX 285 to score any notable wins today. With L4D being fairly light on shader use, this leads us once more to the ROPs or texture units. Unless there’s an edge-case where the GTX 465 is slower than the linear difference between the two cards’ ROPs, the ROPs alone can’t explain this difference. The texture filtering difference between the two cards could explain this though.
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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
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!