HEXUS bang4buck and HEXUS bang4watt
Putting all the numbers into perspective, let's take a closer look at overall performance.
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for buck, we've aggregated the 1,920x1,080 frame-rates for seven games, normalised them* and taken account of the single-cards' prices.
But there are more provisos than we'd care to shake a stick at. We could have chosen seven different games, the cards' prices could have been derived from other sources and pricing tends to fluctuate daily, especially for new-release GPUs.
Consequently, the table below highlight a metric that should only be used as a yardstick for evaluating comparative performance with price factored in. Other architectural benefits are not covered, obviously.
| Graphics cards | NVIDIA GTX 580 | NVIDIA GTX 570 | ASUS GTX 480 | ASUS GTX 470 | Gigabyte GTX 560 SO | NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti | KFA2 GTX 460 1,024MB | EVGA GTX 460 768MB | HIS HD 5970 | HIS HD 6970 | Sapp HD 6950 | XFX HD 5870 | Sapp HD 6850 | HIS HD 6870 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aggregate FPS (1,920x1,080) |
553.2 |
487.4 |
484.9 |
388.1 |
492.8 |
419.3 |
322 |
298.4 | 586.9 | 468.4 | 425.7 | 409.4 | 325.4 |
370.9 |
| Normalised* FPS (1,920x1,080) |
480.2 | 431.7 | 432.6 | 334.5 | 436.4 | 366.4 | 252.7 | 222 | 503.4 | 428.7 | 386.4 | 369.9 | 266.1 | 323.4 |
| Current pricing | £389 | £259 | £285 | £189 | £225 | £199 | £145 | £125 | £425 | £299 | £225 | £210 | £145 | £175 |
| bang4buck (1,920x1,080) |
1.23 |
1.67 |
1.52 |
1.77 |
1.94 |
1.84 |
1.74 | 1.78 | 1.18 | 1.44 | 1.72 | 1.76 | 1.83 |
1.85 |
| GPU power consumption** | 252 | 196 | 244 | 204 |
207 | 154 | 169 | 130 | 257 | 183 | 137 | 139 | 97 | 126 |
| bang4watt*** (1,920x1,080) |
1.91 | 2.2 | 1.77 | 1.64 |
2.11 |
2.38 |
1.49 |
1.78 | 1.96 |
2.34 | 2.82 | 2.66 | 2.74 |
2.57 |
* the normalisation refers to taking playable frame rate into account. Should a card benchmark at over 60 frames per second in any one game, the extra fps count as half. Similarly, should a card benchmark lower, say at 40fps, we deduct half the difference from its average frame rate and the desired 60fps, giving it a HEXUS.bang4buck score of 30 marks. The minimum allowable frame rate is 20fps but that scores zero.
** the GPU power consumption is derived from subtracting a flat rate of 100W - indicating system power-draw without a card - from the Call of Duty: Black Ops load figure. While this figure isn't solely indicative of power pulled by the GPU, as the CPU also throttles up, it's a better metric than using peak system-draw alone.
*** the HEXUS.bang4watt score is a crude measurement of how much normalised performance the GPU provides when evaluated against GPU power-draw that's shown in the table: the former is divided by the latter. We're using the peak power-draw numbers obtained by running real-world Call of Duty: Black Ops.
Analysis
Tot them up and the Gigabyte GTX 560 Ti SO's aggregate numbers are just a touch higher than a GeForce GTX 570's - mainly down to a slightly better score in Call of Duty: Black Ops. What's more, it's faster than any single GPU from AMD's stable.
We've already discussed that the extra performance comes at a cost. That cost is higher-than-expected power-draw when playing games, though any HEXUS bang4watt score over two is considered good.
