HEXUS.bang4buck, and overclocking
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 285 1,024MB | BFG GeForce GTX 275 OC 896MB | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 896MB | BFG
GeForce GTX 260 896MB |
XFX Radeon HD 4890 OC XXX 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 XT 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 2,048MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1,200 | 409.15 | 375.56 | 364.28 | 326.75 | 371.84 | 354.02 | 318.63 | 441.69 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,200 | 352.25 | 335.12 |
328.52 |
301.27 | 334.02 |
322.78 |
291.71 |
370.84 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £299 | £233 | £199+ | £160 | £210 | £202 |
£155 | £260 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,200 | 1.178 |
1.438 | 1.651 | 1.883 | 1.591 |
1.598 |
1.882 | 1.426 |
* 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, of course.Analysis
The aggregate and normalised marks are higher than the reference card's for two reasons. Firstly, faster clocks give it a small boost. Secondly, less-erratic performance in Race Driver: GRID adds a few extra marks, too.
End result is that the HEXUS.bang4buck, over our five games, is lower than the Radeons', because their pricing has now dropped to around the £200 mark. Trouble is, unless you game at 2,560x1,600, the GeForce GTX 260 896MB and Radeon HD 4870 512MB are now so comparatively cheap - £150-£160 - that they offer better value for money.
The only stinker here is the GeForce GTX 285, which is both slower and more expensive than the Radeon HD 4850 X2.
Overclocking
The BFG-overclocking on the OC Edition is barely worth on a mention as benchmark performance rises by around 2 per cent over the various games. Cranking it up ourselves, we hit a 720MHz core, 1,600MHz shaders, and 2,462MHz RAM - a genuine increase over default. Rerunning Enemy Territory: Quake Wars at 1,920x1,200 4xAA 16xAF, which returned an average 90.5fps at the shipping clocks, overclocked performance rose to 98.37fps, representing a figure higher than a stock-clocked GeForce GTX 285 1,024MB.
