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.
| 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 | KFA2 GeForce GTX 460 LTD OC 1,024MB | ZOTAC GeForce GTX 460 1,024MB | EVGA GeForce GTX 460 768MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 XF 1,024MB | 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 | 455.1 | 449.8 | 295.80 | 251.3 | 234.16 | 445.42 | 300.27 | 263.97 | 211.02 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,080 | 316.95 | 252.48 | 188.24 | 371.55 | 366.8 | 243.0 | 196.03 | 174.84 | 372.31 | 263.56 | 223.09 | 156.5 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £370 | £235 | £195 | £370 | £360 | £210 | £185 | £165 | £470 | £325 | £235 | £170 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,080 | 0.857 | 1.074 | 0.965 | 1.004 | 1.019 | 1.157 | 1.060 | 1.060 | 0.792 | 0.811 | 0.949 | 0.921 |
* 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.
Evaluation
That's interesting. The KFA2 GTX 460 1GB LTD OC may be one of the most expensive GTX 460s on offer, but out the box performance is good enough to make it score highly on our bang4buck rating system.
You are essentially getting HD 5850-like performance for £25 less.
