HEXUS.bang4buck and HEXUS.bang4watt
Get ready for a lot of numbers.In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for buck, 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 tables 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.
1,920x1,200
| Graphics cards | HIS Radeon HD 5850 XF 2,048MB | HIS Radeon HD 5970 2,048MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 TOXIC 2,048MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 1,536MB | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 1,280MB | BFG GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB | BFG GeForce GTX 285 1,024MB | EVGA GeForce GTX 275 896MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1,200 | 481.63 | 479.12 | 355.58 | 342.43 | 295.68 | 432.89 | 345.82 | 363.16 |
259.49 |
234.23 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,200 | 364.78 |
364.02 | 297.49 |
289.59 |
254.29 |
334.22 | 277.4 |
295.16 |
224.23 |
202.39 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £450 | £550 | £360 | £310 | £225 | £440 | £320 | £350 | £275 | £199 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,200 | 0.811 | 0.662 | 0.826 | 0.934 | 1.13 | 0.759 |
0.867 |
0.843 |
0.815 | 1.017 |
| HEXUS.bang4watt score at 1,920x1,200** | 0.812 | 0.793 | 0.8 | 0.905 | 0.892 |
0.704 |
0.806 |
0.584 |
0.598 |
0.552 |
2,560x1,600
| Graphics cards | HIS Radeon HD 5850 XF 2,048MB | HIS Radeon HD 5970 2,048MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 TOXIC 2,048MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 1,536MB | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 1,280MB | BFG GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB | BFG GeForce GTX 285 1,024MB | EVGA GeForce GTX 275 896MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 2,560x1,600 | 343.41 |
346.21 |
258.93 | 244.84 | 209.08 | 290.29 | 229.71 | 264.78 |
NA |
NA |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 2,560x1,600 | 288.72 |
284.53 |
224.47 |
216.92 |
175.2 |
240.53 | 199.2 |
233.2 |
NA |
NA |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £450 | £550 | £360 | £310 | £225 | £440 | £320 | £350 | £275 | £199 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 2,560x1,600 | 0.642 | 0.517 | 0.623 | 0.7 | 0.779 | 0.547 | 0.622 | 0.666 | NA | NA |
* 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.bang4watt score is a crude measurement of how much normalised performance the GPU provides when evaluated against peak system-wide power-draw that's shown on the previous page: the former is divided by the latter. Bear in mind that FurMark, the application used, tends to load up NVIDIA cards a touch more than AMD's.
The HEXUS.bang4buck score only takes the performance and price into account, of course. The two HEXUS.bang4bucks take the DiRT 2 DX9 benchmark into account, rather than DX11, because the older NVIDIA cards cannot run the API.
Evaluation
Radeon HD 5970-matching performance for £100 less. Says it all, really.
