HEXUS.bang4buck and bang4watt
Putting all the numbers into perspective, let's take a closer look at overall performance and value for money.
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for buck, we've aggregated the frame-rates for all our gaming benchmarks, normalised them1 and taken account of today's pricing.
But there are more provisos than we'd care to shake a stick at. We could have chosen 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 tables below highlight a metric that should only be used as a yardstick for evaluating comparative performance with price factored in.
Value analysis at 1,920x1,080 |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Graphics card | Aggregate FPS | Normalised FPS1 | Current price | Bang4buck | Power consumption | Bang4watt2 | ||
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 (1,280MB) | 219.40 | 171.10 | £240 | 0.71 | 245 | 0.70 | ||
| Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 (1,280MB) | 210.80 | 160.90 | £220 | 0.73 | 271 | 0.59 | ||
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1,024MB) | 182.40 | 123.60 | £170 | 0.73 | 225 | 0.55 | ||
| AMD Radeon HD 6970 (2,048MB) | 206.70 | 158.75 | £255 | 0.62 | 244 | 0.65 | ||
| AMD Radeon HD 6950 (2,048MB) | 184.80 | 127.20 | £185 | 0.69 | 206 | 0.62 | ||
| AMD Radeon HD 6870 (1,024MB) | 165.90 | 98.85 | £140 | 0.71 | 182 | 0.54 | ||
Value analysis at 2,560x1,600 |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Graphics card | Aggregate FPS | Normalised FPS1 | Current price | Bang4buck | Power consumption | Bang4watt2 | ||
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 (1,280MB) | 117.50 | 36.15 | £240 | 0.15 | 245 | 0.15 | ||
| Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 (1,280MB) | 112.60 | 31.05 | £220 | 0.14 | 271 | 0.11 | ||
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1,024MB) | 78.40 | 18.00 | £170 | 0.11 | 225 | 0.08 | ||
| AMD Radeon HD 6970 (2,048MB) | 124.50 | 41.25 | £255 | 0.16 | 244 | 0.17 | ||
| AMD Radeon HD 6950 (2,048MB) | 109.70 | 26.40 | £185 | 0.14 | 206 | 0.13 | ||
| AMD Radeon HD 6870 (1,024MB) | 75.00 | 15.75 | £140 | 0.11 | 182 | 0.09 | ||
1 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.
2 the HEXUS.bang4watt score is a crude measurement of how much normalised performance the GPU provides when evaluated against system-wide 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 Crysis 2.
Summary
It's important to remember that our bang4buck is based on a few titles and doesn't take other architectural advantages into account, but for 1080p gaming, the GTX 560 Ti 448 offers good value for money.
At the time of writing, a predicted £220 price tag puts the 1080p bang4buck result right in line with a standard GTX 560 Ti. If Gigabyte can shave a further few pounds off the price tag, the 448-core card would stand alone - a £210 asking price would raise the bang4buck score to 0.77, but there's a flip side to that coin; if Gigabyte launches at £240, the 1080p bang4buck score would dip down to 0.67.
