HEXUS.bang4buck
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang per buck, we've aggregated the 1,280x1,024 frame-rates for the four games and taken account of the cards' prices.
But there are more provisos than we'd care to shake a stick at. We could have chosen four different games, the cards' prices could have been derived from other sources and pricing tends to fluctuate daily.
Consequently, the table and graph 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 | Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 512MB GDDR3 | Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 XF | PowerColor Radeon HD 4850 | ZOTAC GeForce 9800 GT |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aggregate marks at 1,280x1,024 | 201.65 |
350.31 |
341.95 |
279.5 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £55 | £110 | £115 | £95 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,280x1,024 | 4.03 |
3.18 |
2.97 |
2.92 |
| Acceptable frame rate (av. 30fps) at 1,280x1,024 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Here's the HEXUS.bang4buck graph at 1,280x1,024. The graph
divides the aggregate score by the price.
| HEXUS.bang4buck at 1,280x1,024 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| PowerColor HD 4850 | Sapphire HD 4670 XF | Sapphire HD 4670 512 | ZOTAC 9800 GT |
| 2.97 | 3.18 | 4.03 | 2.92 |
What we see here is that two-card HD 4670 suffers a little, which is to be expected in a multi-GPU environment. Simplifying if it some, the pleasing thing, we suppose, is that two cards offer better value than either a Radeon HD 4850 and GeForce 9800 GT, based purely on 3D performance.
