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 six 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 six 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) |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMD Radeon HD 6790 | 269.00 | 212.50 | £105 | 2.02 | 90 | 2.36 |
| HIS Radeon HD 5770 | 240.40 | 177.30 | £95 | 1.87 | 81 | 2.19 |
| Sapphire Radeon HD 5750 | 210.30 | 135.45 | £85 | 1.59 | 56 | 2.42 |
| AMD Radeon HD 6670 | 167.8 | 78.6 | £75 | 1.05 | 41 | 1.92 |
| Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 | 150.1 | 62.25 | £65 | 0.96 | 45 | 1.38 |
| AMD Radeon HD 6450 | 65.7 | 0 | £40 | 0 | 19 | 0 |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti | 284.1 | 239.95 | £110 | 2.17 | NA | NA |
| Inno3D GeForce GTS 450 | 230.30 | 166.05 | £90 | 1.85 | 71 | 2.34 |
| ASUS GeForce GT 440 | 114.8 | 22.65 | £60 | 0.38 | 39 | 0.58 |
| ASUS GeForce GT 430 | 100.1 | 8.25 | £50 | 0.17 | 28 | 0.29 |
* 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 40W - indicating system power-draw without a card - from the Just Cause 2 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 Just Cause 2.
Analysis
We're being cruel on these low-to-mid-range cards by evaluating the bang4buck and bang4watt performance at a 1080p setting. That said, the metric does show that a Radeon HD 5700-class or GTX 550-class of GPU is required to play at medium-quality settings with a full-HD resolution.
