NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465 performance overview

Posted on Monday, May 31 2010 @ 17:30 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
NVIDIA today rolled out its cheapest Fermi yet, the GeForce GTX 465. Lets take a look at a couple of reviews to see whether this new DX11 card is worth your money.

First we head over to AnandTech, they conclude that performance-wise, this card is positioned pretty well - it's about 8 percent slower than the Radeon HD 5850 but the price tag is 8 percent lower as well. However, unless you really need NVIDIA technologies like CUDA or PhysX, it's a good idea to spend the extra $20 for the Radeon HD 5850 because this card uses less power and runs a lot less hot than the GeForce GTX 465.
At this point it’s impossible to recommend the GeForce GTX 465 for the average buyer. The extra $20 for a Radeon HD 5850 will buy a card that is cooler, quieter, and appropriately faster. Unless you’re on an edge case and need to be in the NVIDIA ecosystem for a specific reason such as CUDA, 3D Vision, or DX10/11 transparency anti-aliasing (more on this later this week), a 5850 is going to be the better card. NVIDIA is going to have to drive the feature differences between the GeForce GTX 400 series and the Radeon HD 5000 series to sell the GTX 465, as performance won’t do it.
Our next stop is Legit Reviews, they conclude NVIDIA's latest card is the fastest DirectX 11 model for under $300.
Throughout the testing today, the GeForce GTX 465's were able to outperform the XFX Radeon HD 5830. Though, they weren't quite up to the task of competing against the HIS Radeon HD 5870 except in Unigine Heaven 2.1. At 1280x1024 the EVGA GeForce GTX 465 SC Edition was able to edge out the Radeon HD 5870. The Galaxy GeForce GTX 465 fell just short of the Radeon HD 5870 numbers by only .3 frames per second. However, the pair of GeForce GTX 465's did lose some ground when it came to the higher resolution of 1920x1080.
A third opinion can be found at PC Perspective, they write the Fermi architecture is becoming more accessible to the gaming enthusiast but that it's still a lot less efficient than the Radeon HD 5000 series.
There are few comparisons to be made here, the first of which is the new GeForce GTX 465 pitted against the AMD Radeon HD 5850, both of which will be available in the $279-299 range. In our gaming tests we found that both cards brought the same gaming experience and performance in our array of titles. The NVIDIA offering did take a slight lead HAWX and Metro 2033 while the AMD Radeon option was faster in DiRT 2. Other than that, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference when seeing them side by side. This is not a coincidence people - NVIDIA has obviously tweaked the specs, clocks and pricing for this exact reason.

The next question is about the intra-NVIDIA comparison of the GTX 465 and the GTX 470. Amazingly, the change in specifications pretty much EXACTLY determined the performance differences between the two options as we saw clear 25-28% performance gaps between the GTX 465 and GTX 470 in all GPU-bottlenecked resolutions of our games. Considering there were 27% fewer shaders, 27% fewer texture units and 25% fewer ROPs that exactness is impressive. I guess we could have just skipped that whole multi-day testing process, huh??


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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