NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 460: The $200 King
by Ryan Smith on July 11, 2010 11:54 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- GeForce GTX 400
- GeForce GTX 460
- NVIDIA
Left 4 Dead
Introduced in 2004, Valve’s Source engine continues to live on in new Valve games. At this point even newer Source games like Left 4 Dead are rarely GPU limited to a significant degree, but we keep it on here due to the fact that we’re expecting at least one more Source game next year’s in Portal 2.
Without much of a reliance on GPUs to speak of, our cards can do little to separate themselves here. The advantages of the 1GB GTX 460 are more or less lost, and overclocking doesn’t do a great deal to separate things either. With the launch of the GTX 465 we speculated that it was held back by a lack of texturing capabilities, and these results seem to support that position, with the GTX 465 falling behind the pack by a few percent.
However this is really a game that does better under AMD’s cards. The 5830 springs to life here in a dead-heat with both GTX 460 cards, while the 5850 shoots well ahead. The GTX 460 would seem to do better on shader-heavy games than the 5830.
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san1s - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
I hope this is the card that finally brings price drops, they have been stagnant for far too long.JGabriel - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
It should. The 768MB version seems to perform about 5% better than the 5830, and the 1GB version comes to ~90% of the 5850.
Just on a performance per dollar basis, that means ATI should drop the 5830 to $189 max, with somewhere in the $170-$180 range being more reasonable, and the 5850 needs to drop down to about $249. Basically, we should be looking at 10%-20% price cuts for the 5670, 5750, 5770, 5830, and 5850.
It should force the GTX 470 under $300, too.
.
medi01 - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
Best way to drop prices would be to ramp up production. Now, if what I've heard is true (fab treats nVidia as a preferred customer, unlike AMD) we will get yet another round of unfair competition, which in the end will hurt us, customers. :(PS
Is it me, or articles on this side seem quite a bit to be more positive on what nVidia does, than what would feel neutral? Marketing hints like "it’s not a simple reduced version of GF100 like what AMD did" all over... :(
jonup - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
It is you! Only need to go to the GTX465 review to disptove your point.teohhanhui - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
Giving credit where it is due?nafhan - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
Ryan said that because the GF104 isn't a simple reduced version of GF100. Did you notice the part of the article where they talked about superscalar processing? That's not only a marketing bullet point, it's a pretty big change from an architecture point of view, too!medi01 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
And this detail brings what particular benefit to the user? In particular, contrasting it with competitors (otherwise superior, cooler and faster) solution? Someone makes something wrong, then he has to rework it (the competitor, that did it right from the beginning, doesn't) and this somehow makes he deserve "some credit"?Ben90 - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
About that "marketing" comment about not a shrink of GF100, its completely true and how does that make this site pro-NVIDIA?You should check out the next article; very first paragraph:
"In 2007 we reviewed NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800 GT. At the time we didn’t know it would be the last NVIDIA GPU we would outright recommend at launch."
medi01 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
It's completely true, yet it is confusing at best. Piece of silicon is "praised" for something, that has no practical value to the consumer.And please, don't compare nVidia article to nVidia article, compare it to AMD:
When 5830 was reviewed, and mind you, it's a nice card that runs cooler, has eyefinity, but is a tad slower than older 49xx, this fact was PUT INTO TITLE, mind you. It was mentioned in the very NAME of the article, that new 200$ card is a tad slower than older ones. (basically the only "bad thing" that one could say about the card)
In case of 465 it's barely mentioned "oh, it's slower than older 200$ cards".
=(
Lonyo - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Anandtech is a tech site that often goes more into the under the hood bits.On some sites you will see them calculating performance per currency numbers, or performance per watt.
On Anandtech you will have them discussing things like changes to the architecture, the way the threading works etc.
That's not a new thing, and it's not a biased thing, that's just what they do here at AT in their reviews. It just so happens that the GTX460 has some of those under the hood changes compared to the earlier cards based on the same architecture, so they are discussed in the article.
If you don't care too much about that sort of thing, you can just skip to the benchmarks. If you are interested in it, then it's a nice addition.