NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 460: The $200 King

The Test

For our test we are using NVIDIA’s latest 256-series drivers, currently at version 258.80. As far as performance goes these drivers are virtually identical to earlier 256-series drivers on the GTX 400 series, so performance has not significantly changed since the launch of the drivers alongside the GTX 465. As the 256-series drivers did improve performance across a number of games for the GTX 480 and GTX 470, numbers have been updated where applicable.

As for our Radeon cards, we are continuing to use the 10.3a drivers. Radeon 5000 series performance has not changed for the games in our suite since those drivers were released.

Included in our test results are our vendor cards from Asus, Zotac, and EVGA. You can read the full review for those cards in Part 2 of our launch coverage.

For testing the GTX 460 in SLI, we used our 1GB reference card in SLI with Zotac’s 1GB card. This is suitable for performance but not for noise testing. Testing the reference 768MB GTX 460 in SLI was not possible due to the lack of a suitable matching card; however we do have the EVGA GTX 460 768MB SuperClock in SLI.