HEXUS.bang4buck
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 SLI 1,024MB | EVGA GeForce GTX 460 SC SLI 768MB | 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 XF 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 | 455.1 | 449.8 | 251.3 | 234.16 | 312.99 | 300.27 | 445.42 | 263.97 | 211.02 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,080 | 316.95 | 252.48 |
188.24 |
371.55 |
366.8 |
196.03 |
174.84 |
274.66 |
263.56 |
372.31 |
223.09 |
156.5 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £375 | £280 | £215 | £370 | £360 | £185 | £163 | £400 | £325 | £460 | £230 | £170 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,080 | 0.845 |
0.902 |
0.876 |
1.004 |
1.019 |
0.985 |
1.073 |
0.687 |
0.811 |
0.809 |
0.97 |
0.921 |
| HEXUS.bang4watt score at 1,920x1,080** | 0.778 |
0.73 |
0.565 |
0.953 |
0.978 |
0.678 |
0.648 |
0.796 |
0.887 |
0.931 |
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.
