NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 460: The $200 King

DIRT 2

Codemasters latest racing game marks the return of a racer to our benchmark suite. As the first DX11 racer, DIRT 2 makes pretty through use of the DX11’s tessellation abilities, not to mention being the best looking racer we have ever seen.

DIRT 2 is a game that NVIDIA’s cards do well at, so long as they’re not overly crippled like the GTX 465. Here the 1GB GTX 460 is effectively tied with the Radeon 5850, while the 768MB GTX 460 trampled the 5830 by 14%. Among NVIDA’s cards the 1GB GTX 460 pulls off a 9% advantage over its cheaper sibling, and the GTX 465 falls to even the 768MB GTX 460 here by a frame.

We’re also seeing the first signs of being CPU limited, with a pair of GTX 460s coming to within 10% of a pair of GTX 480s.