GTX 460 Reviews

At least here Radeon 5850 are still much more expensive than US$230... around US$300, actually.

 

Yes, current price is worse, but I'm implying, that GTX460-1GB price/performance is worse, than price/performance of HD5850 during last year. Despite it, GTX460 is cellebrated as the best bang for buck product since 8800GT...

GF104 is the best green GPU since the launch of G94, but I don't think that curretn GF104 product line-up is the best what can this GPU offer...

 

The type of filtering and the level of Anisotropic Filtering only dictates the maximum sample level dependant on the plane of the surface. If you are staring at a wall face on you obviously don't need to apply all these samples; a lot of the time in-game you are not taking anything close to the maximum number of samples.

 

I'm hoping the 5850 drops to $250. I'd go out and buy it if it did.

 

not happening according to R3D

edit: and while it sucks for the conscientious buyer with a mind to budget performance, IMO it exposes ATi's greatest weakness.. lack of product segmentation according to key pricing between $200 and $300. For many with a generation old card (read 4800/GF200) there is little room to upgrade at comparable cost. For example when I bought my 4890, it was ATI's top single gpu offering and got it for $200 ($250 - 50 MIR/Instant) and still to this day there is hardly a substantial upgrade at the same price point ($200),.. the 5830 is a lame duck (should be shot, defeathered, cooked and eaten with much sauce IMO). Even at $250 ATI has no real offering,.. I'll probally be accused of wearing a tinfoil hat or something but honestly I wouldn't doubt if ATI and NV both have an "unoffcial" understanding of pricing their respective parts... maybe not to the extent of collusion (as they have been found to be guilty of iirc, in the past) however ATI and NV both seem to have priced their products so as not to really step on the other too much. Great for the respective company's CM per Unit.. bad for the perspective cost caring consumer.

 

I agree. I got a 1 gig 4850 for $150 bucks. To me the 5830 at $200 isn't worth the upgrade. The 5850 should be at $250 or under imo for its price to performance. If ati isn't going to drop it then they simply wont get money from me. Thier line up from $180 to $300 is just not apealing and I've heard it said many times by many people looking to upgrade. However the worset thing is that I've actually watched prices go up and not down over the last 10 months. Tho its not like nvdia has shown up to the party for the last 10 months either.

I have no no idea what ati is doing. I'm hoping they have a refresh ready to go and prices will change and 5830 performance will hit the $150 mark , 5850 will hit $200 and 5870 will be at $280 with two parts faster at the $350 and $400 marks.

 

Unless Nvidia has really good supply lined up, I doubt they'll be too aggressive on pricing. My guess is the 460s will drift upwards a bit rather than the ATI competition coming down. These cards are really "too good" to start a price war in the $150-$250 segment. If people start expecting to get a continuous stream of significant upgrades to their 4850-class cards at the same prices (hell, mine was $75) neither of them will be making money any time soon.

 

To be fair the 4850 launched june of 2008 at $200. So its been over 2 years already. Right now the 5830 is offering 4870 to 4890 performance at more than the original cost of the 4850 . Doesn't seem like a great deal imo.

 

Well, that was sorta my point. I don't think either of them will want for a situation where their +/- $200 offerings rapidly start dropping into "budget" territory again. Now, for gamers, having the GT 240 and HD 5670 occupying the price-points where you had much faster cards a couple of months ago obviously isn't ideal, but the midrange pricing of last gen was an anomaly.

 

Yes but that was entirely due to the absolutely brutal price war that ATI and Nvidia engaged in, which was like nothing ever in the history of GPU products. In the tech space the only other time I've seen such a bloody and cutthroat price war was when Intel introduced the Core 2 Duo and started hammering at AMDs marketshare.

I really don't expect to ever see another price war like that in the GPU space. Both AMD and Nvidia were hurt by that, and while AMD could claim a victory in gaining marketshare, it was a pyrrhic victory at best.

Regards,
SB

 

Is there any review which took care of the Open CL / CUDA Performances?

 

N1.

Do you at least take the amount of samples required to deliver the best possible filtering results when doing aniso?

 

We're talking 3D 101 here.

 

An EVGA GTX 460 SC review using a midrange system

Yes, there are benefits to writing graphics card reviews with zero CPU limitation. I know what they are, you know what they are, etc...

However, for the performance segment I don't think it's the best thing to do. This market demographic (for the most part) does not have i7 systems running at 3.9 ghz with 12 GB RAM. IMO when they look a review for a video card that's in their market segment they should see what the card can do in something that's like their system.

My reviews over the years have reflected this opinion.

I thought I would let you guys know that I published a GTX 465 review for NV News on release day. I used a mid-range AMD setup, and the compare cards were a GTX 465 and an HD 5830. The review is located at:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=152967

Yes, it's a forum link. For right now, NV News reviews are being published through vbulletin. That certainly does not make it an "unofficial" review though. Just as other review partners do, I had a Webex meeting/presentation with Bryan Del Rizzo of NVIDIA, and was able to utilize an NVIDIA-written review guide as well as some other review partner-only info. NV News has been in the review game for a long time, and though we've slowed down a bit, we still cover major releases like this one (I/we also reviewed a GTX 465).

Is this review as good as those by the Big Boys? No. But it does IMO convey some interesting points, and addresses some of the wishes and wants of the performance segment via some information that I collected from various hardware forums by doing some informal pre-release surveys. It is also unique for its use of a real mid-range system. To be honest this review ended up being the most exciting I have done for NV News. I've been reviewing for them since 2003, and honestly I've never had a better bang-for-the-buck video card in my system (FX 5900 XT and Geforce 6800 Vanilla were close but didn't match the completeness and value of the GTX 460).

Anyway, I hope that you enjoy the review. PM me or reach me at NV News, [H], PC Perspective, Rage3D, Guru3D, techpowerup, Xtremesystems, elitebastards, Tom's or here if you have any questions.

 

I'll take a look, thanks.

 

Thanks for the link! Without having read it yet, it's nice to get a different perspective - no matter what the outcome may be.

 

Ah, ok. So it's about what the hardware should be allowed and able to do and not what the drivers are actually telling them to do.

 

What is this supposed to mean actually? If you're asking if they actually use 128 texels to generate 1 pixel on the surface with the greatest obliqueness/rate of change, with 16 tap anisotropic+trilinear, then the answer is no(sorry Wavey).

Based on some stuff I've seen and some early work I've done, I have a strong hunch all you guys on the driver cheatzzor hate-train are barking up the wrong tree, and that the causes for the observed behaviour are a tad less obvious, albeit considerably more interesting. Note that AI disabling does not impact it, albeit it interacts with other optimizations.

 

16x AF has always meant MAX 16x AF, ie. only applicable to faces almost parallel to the viewing direction, and then less depending on the angle.

Also ingame AF settings would usually only be applied to the relevant textures, while control-panel AF naturally has to be on every texture, so the latter would usually be slower.