HEXUS.bang4buck
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang per buck, we've aggregated the 1,920x1,200 frame-rates for five games, normalised them* 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 five different games, the cards' prices could have been derived from other sources and pricing tends to fluctuate daily.
Consequently, the table, below, highlights 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 | BFG GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB | BFG GeForce GTX 285 1,024MB | Inno3D GeForce GTX 260 Accelero iChiLL 896MB | XFX Radeon HD 4870 X2 2,048MB | XFX Radeon HD 4870 XXX 1,024MB | Sapphire
Radeon HD 4870 512MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1,200 | 579.4 | 409.15 | 349.71 | 529.09 |
327.66 | 310.72 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,200 | 439.71 |
352.25 |
315.43 | 414.54 |
299.17 | 280.56 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £449.15 | £299 | £210 |
£340.49 |
£178.24 | £143.72 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,200 | 0.979 | 1.178 | 1.502 | 1.219 | 1.678 | 1.952 |
* 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 HEXUS.bang4buck score only takes the performance and price into account.Analysis
What we see is that very-high-end card - costing £300+ - provides significant value when evaluated at 1,920x1,200. GeForce GTX 260 and Radeon HD 4870 1GB also provide decent performance at this resolution, but for significantly less money, such that £300+ cards occupy a performance niche represented by 2,560x1,600 gaming.
The HEXUS.bangbuck still shows that it's worth spending the £40 extra on the Radeon HD 4870 X2 over and above the GeForce GTX 285, and paying £100 more doesn't provide linear performance gains from the GTX 295. As such, at £340, it's not a bad deal, once the competition has been factored in.
