HEXUS.bang4buck
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang per buck, we've aggregated the 1,680x1,050 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, especially for new cards.
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 | HIS Radeon HD 4770 512MB GDDR5 | Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 GDDR3 512MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 512MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB | XFX GeForce 9600 GT 512MB | Palit GeForce 9800 GT 512MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,680x1,050 | 358.48 | 204.5 | 314.85 | 357.55 | 243.36 | 308.86 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,680x1,050 | 329.24 | 156.76 |
302.57 |
328.78 |
215.04 |
299.66 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £85 | £57 | £75 | £110 | £70 | £85 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,680x1,050 | 3.87 |
2.75 |
4.03 |
2.99 |
3.07 |
3.53 |
* 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 HIS Radeon HD 4770's cumulative and normalised scores are very, very close to the HD 4850's. Taking our five games into account and using mid-range settings it can be said to perform the same. The HEXUS.bang4buck score of 3.87 is comfortably higher because the package is £25 cheaper.
The surprising aspect is that it doesn't score the highest. A few straggling HD 4830s are being sold off cheaply, as low as £75, and they makes for a better deal...just.
NVIDIA's £85 GeForce 9800 GT also looks impressive, mainly due to decent performance and a low, low etail price on the Palit card of £85 from Scan.co.uk.
If you take away one thought from the HEXUS.bang4buck it should be that the Radeon HD 4770 offers HD 4850-like performance for >20 per cent less money. We envisage a round of price-chopping, where HD 4850 comes down to sub-£99, GeForce 9800 GT 512MB to £80, and GeForce GTS 250 512MB to £90.
