NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 465: Cheaper Isn’t Always Better

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.