HEXUS.bang4buck
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang perbuck, we've aggregated the 1,920x1,200 and 2,560x1,600 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.
HEXUS.bang4buck at 1,920x1,200
| Graphics cards | ATI
Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB |
Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 2,048MB |
Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 OC 1,024MB |
BFG
GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB |
BFG GeForce GTX 285 1,024MB |
XFX GeForce GTX 275 896MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1,200 | 524.80 | 550.42 | 393.90 | 578.90 | 404.15 | 377.17 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,200 | 412.40 | 425.21 | 345.66 | 439.45 | 342.71 | 325.25 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £299 |
£242.97 | £177.10 | £346.00 |
£250 | £159.26 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,200 | 1.380 | 1.750 |
1.952 |
1.270 |
1.370 | 2.042 |
HEXUS.bang4buck at 2,560x1,600
| Graphics cards | ATI
Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB |
Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 2,048MB |
Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 OC 1,024MB |
BFG
GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB |
BFG GeForce GTX 285 1,024MB |
XFX GeForce GTX 275 896MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 2,560x1,600 | 360.16 | 373.41 | 257.90 | 403.27 | 268.97 | 246.62 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 2,560x1,600 | 330.08 | 336.70 | 258.18 | 351.64 | 241.58 | 226.91 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £299 |
£242.97 | £177.10 | £346.00 |
£250 | £159.26 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 2,560x1,600 | 1.104 | 1.386 | 1.459 | 1.016 | 0.966 | 1.425 |
* 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
Taking the value component into account, the overall proposition is reasonable at both resolutions. What our HEXUS.bang4buck shows is that the Radeon HD 5870 needs to come down to around £250 if it's going to be really, really competitive with older cards.
Overclocking
Cranking up the speed from the stock 850MHz/4,800MHz, we managed to raise the card's clocks to 901MHz core and 5,200MHz memory with rock-solid stability. Across our range of benchmarks, the overclocked card posted results which were, on average, 6.8 per cent faster. Not a lot, granted, but we should see special-edition models ship with pre-overclocked frequencies.
