HEXUS.bang4buck and HEXUS.bang4watt
Putting all the numbers into perspective, let's take a closer look at overall performance.
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for buck, we've aggregated the 1,920x1,080 frame-rates for eight 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 eight different games, the cards' prices could have been derived from other sources and pricing tends to fluctuate daily, especially for new-release GPUs.
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 | Sapphire HD 5870 1,024MB | HIS HD 5850 1,024MB | HIS Radeon HD 6870 1,024MB | Sapphire HD 6850 TOXIC | PowerColor HD 6850 PCS+ | ASUS HD 6850 Direct CU | AMD HD 6850 | NVIDIA GTX 580 1,536MB | ASUS GTX 480 1,536MB | ASUS GTX 470 1,280MB | Gigabyte GTX 460 SOC 1,024MB |
KFA2 GTX 460 1,024MB | EVGA GTX 460 768MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aggregate FPS (1,920x1,080) |
444.3 | 381.2 |
374.4 |
377.3 | 377.2 | 362.1 |
357.6 |
595.2 |
527.4 |
431.4 |
419.3 |
356.3 |
329.8 |
| Normalised* FPS (1,920x1,080) |
392.25 | 315.3 |
351.4 |
308.65 |
308.7 | 289.05 |
283.9 |
513.2 |
466.4 |
369.5 |
350.85 |
273.85 |
239.1 |
| Current pricing | £235 | £180 | £185 | £165 | £160 | £147 | £150 | £399 | £330 | £180 | £175 | £150 | £125 |
| bang4buck (1,920x1,080) |
1.67 | 1.75 |
1.9 |
1.87 | 1.93 | 1.97 |
1.89 |
1.29 |
1.41 |
2.05 |
2 |
1.83 |
1.91 |
| GPU power consumption** | 134 |
109 | 117 | 110 | 109 | 97 | 104 | 244 | 229 | 188 |
153 | 150 | 134 |
| bang4watt*** (1,920x1,080) |
2.92 | 2.89 |
3 |
2.81 |
2.83 |
2.98 |
2.73 |
2.1 | 2.04 | 1.97 |
2.29 |
1.82 |
1.78 |
* 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 GPU power consumption is derived from subtracting a flat rate of 100W - indicating system power-draw without a card - from the Call of Duty: Black Ops load figure. While this figure isn't solely indicative of power pulled by the GPU, as the CPU also throttles up, it's a better metric than using peak system-draw alone.
*** the HEXUS.bang4watt score is a crude measurement of how much normalised performance the GPU provides when evaluated against GPU power-draw that's shown in the table: the former is divided by the latter. We're using the peak power-draw numbers obtained by running real-world Call of Duty: MW2.
Analysis
This is the first time we've taken eight games across 13 GPUs. The HEXUS.bang4buck and HEXUS.bang4watt tables have been recalculated from scratch. The numbers show that a bang4buck rating of around two is very good for a mid-to-high-end card. The trio of pre-overclocked Radeon HD 6850 cards all get close to it, with the ASUS being the best. It doesn't have the highest performance but does ship with the lowest price.Looking across, the price-reduced GTX 470 and Gigabyte GTX 460 SOC both figure highly, as do the other GTX 460 cards. What this tells us is that any GTX 460 or HD 6850 is a good bet from a performance and price point of view.
The bang4watt numbers favour AMD cards because they have a considerably lower power-draw. The entire Radeon line-up is fundamentally better than the GeForces in this respect, by a good margin, and the ASUS's low power-draw means it does the best of our trio here.
