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 such as the Radeon HD 7770/50.
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 1,280x720 |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Graphics card | Aggregate FPS | Normalised FPS1 | Current price | Bang4buck | Power consumption | Bang4watt2 | ||
| Sapphire Radeon HD 7770 OC (1,024MB) | 405.70 | 370.00 | £140 | 2.64 | 133 | 2.78 | ||
| PowerColor Radeon HD 7770 (1,024MB) | 365.30 | 332.65 | £125 | 2.66 | 117 | 2.84 | ||
| AMD Radeon HD 7750 (1,024MB) | 291.00 | 250.50 | £90 | 2.78 | 89 | 2.81 | ||
| Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 (1,024MB) | 463.10 | 400.15 | £130 | 3.08 | 150 | 2.67 | ||
| Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 (1,024MB) | 390.00 | 348.00 | £110 | 3.16 | 128 | 2.74 | ||
| Sapphire Radeon HD 6790 (1,024MB) | 346.00 | 311.80 | £100 | 3.12 | 140 | 2.23 | ||
| HIS Radeon HD 6770 (1,024MB) | 306.00 | 273.00 | £80 | 3.41 | 126 | 1.29 | ||
| ASUS GeForce GTX 560 DirectCU (1,024MB) | 450.20 | 401.70 | £130 | 3.09 | 181 | 2.22 | ||
| Gigabyte GeForce GTX 550 Ti OC (1,024MB) | 325.70 | 295.85 | £100 | 2.96 | 146 | 2.03 | ||
Value analysis at 1,920x1,080 |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Graphics card | Aggregate FPS | Normalised FPS1 | Current price | Bang4buck | Power consumption | Bang4watt2 | ||
| Sapphire Radeon HD 7770 OC (1,024MB) | 231.50 | 167.25 | £140 | 1.19 | 133 | 1.26 | ||
| PowerColor Radeon HD 7770 (1,024MB) | 208.20 | 132.30 | £125 | 1.06 | 117 | 1.13 | ||
| AMD Radeon HD 7750 (1,024MB) | 162.20 | 63.30 | £90 | 0.70 | 89 | 0.71 | ||
| Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 (1,024MB) | 275.70 | 233.55 | £130 | 1.80 | 150 | 1.56 | ||
| Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 (1,024MB) | 229.30 | 163.95 | £110 | 1.49 | 128 | 1.29 | ||
| Sapphire Radeon HD 6790 (1,024MB) | 194.40 | 111.60 | £100 | 1.12 | 140 | 0.80 | ||
| HIS Radeon HD 6770 (1,024MB) | 176.10 | 88.35 | £80 | 1.10 | 126 | 0.70 | ||
| ASUS GeForce GTX 560 DirectCU (1,024MB) | 255.80 | 203.70 | £130 | 1.57 | 181 | 1.13 | ||
| Gigabyte GeForce GTX 550 Ti OC (1,024MB) | 181.50 | 92.25 | £100 | 0.92 | 146 | 0.63 | ||
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 Total War: Shogun 2.
Summary
The bang4buck summary doesn't take into account the 7770 OC's excellent power-draw, temperature and noise characteristics, but it tells an undeniable truth; as far as FPS performance is concerned, the Radeon HD 6850, Radeon HD 6870 or GeForce GTX 560 will deliver better value in today's games.
