HEXUS.bang4buck and HEXUS.bang4watt
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for buck, we've aggregated the 1,920x1,080 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 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.
1,920x1,080
| Graphics cards | ZOTAC GeForce GTX 480 1,536MB | ZOTAC GeForce GTX 470 1,280MB | ASUS GeForce GTX 465 1,024MB | ZOTAC GeForce GTX 460 1,024MB | EVGA GeForce GTX 460 768MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 2,048MB | HIS Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 1,024MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1080 | 380.1 | 306.47 | 246.59 | 251.3 | 234.16 | 312.99 | 300.27 | 263.97 | 211.02 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,080 | 316.95 | 252.48 |
188.24 |
196.03 |
174.84 |
274.66 |
263.56 |
223.09 |
156.5 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £375 | £280 | £215 | £185 | £163 | £400 | £325 | £230 | £170 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,080 | 0.845 |
0.902 |
0.876 |
1.059 |
1.073 |
0.687 |
0.811 |
0.97 |
0.921 |
| HEXUS.bang4watt score at 1,920x1,080** | 0.815 |
0.73 |
0.565 |
0.678 |
0.648 |
0.796 |
0.887 |
0.826 |
0.573 |
* 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. We're using the peak power-draw numbers obtained by running real-world Crysis Warhead.
The HEXUS.bang4buck score only takes the performance and price into account, of course.
Evaluation
The aggregate marks show just how much cumulative performance the cards managed at the 1,920x1,080 setting. Based on five games with decent image-quality settings, the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 460 1,024MB is around two per cent faster than the GTX 465 and 19 per cent quicker than the Radeon HD 5830. Bring the Radeon's bigger brother into play, albeit with a £30-plus premium over the GTX 460, and it's a few per cent slower.The 768MB card's performance is reduced due to having less memory bandwidth than the GTX 460 1,024MB. The framebuffer size doesn't appear to play much of a role at 1,920x1,080. The numbers show that it's relatively close in performance to the GTX 465 and beats out the Radeon HD 5830 to the tune of 11 per cent. Normalised framerates benefit the Radeon HD 5850 more than the other cards but positions remain the same.
HEXUS.bang4watt metric reinforces the fact that GTX 460 1,024MB is able to provide more performance than the GTX 465 while consuming fewer watts: its score is 20 per cent higher. But the Radeon HD 5800-series cards, excepting the HD 5830, still remain kings of the perf-per-watt rating.
