HEXUS bang4buck and 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 seven games, normalised them* and taken account of the single-cards' prices.
But there are more provisos than we'd care to shake a stick at. We could have chosen seven 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.
| Aggregate FPS (1,920x1,080) |
Normalised* FPS (1,920x1,080) |
Current pricing | bang4buck (1,920x1,080) |
Power consumption** | bang4watt*** (1,920x1,080) |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HIS Radeon HD 5970 2,048MB | 588.6 | 504.3 | £500 | 1.01 | 257 | 1.96 |
| HIS Radeon HD 6970 2,048MB | 468.4 | 428.7 | £280 | 1.53 | 183 | 2.34 |
| PowerColor Radeon HD 6950 2,048MB | 423.4 | 384.6 | £220 | 1.75 | 155 | 2.48 |
| AMD Radeon HD 6950 1,024MB | 424.9 | 385.4 | £200 | 1.93 | 150 | 2.57 |
| Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 TOXIC | 415.6 | 373.5 | £200 | 1.87 | 142 | 2.63 |
| HIS Radeon HD 6870 1,024MB | 370.9 | 323.4 | £175 | 1.85 | 126 | 2.57 |
| Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1,024MB | 325.4 | 266.1 | £150 | 1.77 | 97 | 2.74 |
| XFX Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB | 409.4 | 369.9 | £190 | 1.95 | 139 | 2.66 |
| XFX Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB | 351.1 | 300.2 | £155 | 1.94 | 117 | 2.57 |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 1,536MB | 552.3 | 479.8 | £395 | 1.21 | 252 | 1.90 |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 1,280MB | 487.4 | 431.7 | £265 | 1.63 | 196 | 2.2 |
| ASUS GeForce GTX 480 1,536MB | 484.9 | 432.6 | £325 | 1.33 | 244 | 1.77 |
| ASUS GeForce GTX 470 1,280MB | 390.9 | 337.5 | £190 | 1.78 | 204 | 1.65 |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1,024MB | 419.3 | 366.4 | £200 | 1.83 | 154 | 2.38 |
| KFA2 GeForce GTX 460 1,024MB | 322.0 | 252.7 | £140 | 1.81 | 169 | 1.50 |
| EVGA GeForce GTX 460 768MB | 294.2 | 215.7 | £135 | 1.60 | 130 | 1.66 |
* 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: Black Ops.
Analysis
The Radeon HD 6950 1GB is a little better than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1GB in both the bang4buck and bang4watt. However, the buying advice isn't as clear-cut as that, as the GeForce card has a propensity to clock much higher than its shipping clocks.
Looking at other comparison cards, AMD's hit it just about right with the 1GB variant of the popular HD 6950.
