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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  • osideplayer - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link

    Sorry for the typo's I didn't edit
  • robert3892 - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link

    I would like to know why you didn't benchmark a GTX 465 SLI?
  • Ryan Smith - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link

    We only have the 1 card.
  • spathotan - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link

    Still satisfied with my GTX 285 I bought in February 2009, and these benchmarks support me.
  • mianmian - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link

    Under load, GTX465 "drawing 17W less than the GTX 470 and 72W more than the 5850"
    It is different than the chat indicate.
    The label for 5870 , GTX465, GTX470 must be switched by accident.
  • Ryan Smith - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link

    A graph went AWOL. It has returned.
  • AnnonymousCoward - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link

    ATI is so far ahead.
  • n0nsense - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

    The GTX465 is physicaly identical to GTX470.
    You can overclock it at least to 750MHz. You can flash 470 BIOS and achieve same thing as with unlocking Phenom's cores. And i couldn't find a word about it in all pages.
    This makes this card much more interesting then anything from AMD.
    Actually it is even more interesting then 470. The price is 70$ lower.
    I'd like to see research on these "features". Let's hope someone is already working on it ;)
  • 7Enigma - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

    - cannot guarantee an OC that high when looking at the variabliity of the chips

    -cannot guarantee unlocking extra areas of the card since these are clearly harvested from "bad" 470/480's

    -power consumption/noise is already quite bad and doing either of the above would make this even worse.

    It would have been interesting for it to be mentioned in the conclusion however as a POSSIBLE plus.
  • rohitbaran - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

    I think that the GTX 465 isn't that fast compared to 5850. The tests were done using catalyst 10.3a. I saw benchmarking done with catalyst 10.5 and differences were wider. The GTX 465 lagged behind the 5830 in many cases forget the 5850, which proved to be a bit too mighty for the newcomer 465. So I don't agree completely with the conclusion that 465 offers same performance to price ratio as the 5850.

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