HEXUS.bang4buck and 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.
| 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 | Inno3D GeForce GTX 460 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 | 295.8 | 273.4 | 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 | 221.0 | 196.03 | 174.84 | 372.31 | 263.56 | 223.09 | 156.5 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £360 | £240 | £190 | £360 | £360 | £185 | £185 | £180 | £165 | £470 | £335 | £235 | £170 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,080 | 0.880 | 1.052 | 0.991 | 1.032 | 1.019 | 1.314 | 1.195 | 1.089 | 1.060 | 0.792 | 0.787 | 0.949 | 0.921 |
| Peak power consumption | 389 | 346 | 333 | 390 | 375 | 323 | 307 | 289 | 270 | 400 | 297 | 270 | 273 |
| HEXUS.bang4watt** score at 1,920x1,080 | 0.815 | 0.730 | 0.565 | 0.953 | 0.978 | 0.752 | 0.720 | 0.678 | 0.648 | 0.931 | 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.
Evaluation
Considering the identical £185 asking price, you probably don't need our HEXUS.bang4buck analysis to tell you that the KFA2 GTX 460 LTD OC offers more out-the-box performance than the conservatively-clocked Inno3D card.
Taking into account current pricing, however, we do know that NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 460 1GB - in various flavours - offers the very best bang4buck at 1,920x1,080.
