NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 465: Cheaper Isn’t Always Better
by Ryan Smith on May 31, 2010 3:26 AM ESTBattlefield: Bad Company 2
The latest game in the Battlefield series - Bad Company 2 - is another one of our new DX11 games and has been a smash hit at retail. It’s also surprisingly hard on our GPUs, enough so that we can say we found something that’s more demanding than Crysis. As BC2 doesn’t have a built-in benchmark or recording mode, here we take a FRAPS run of the jeep chase in the first act, which as an on-rails portion of the game provides very consistent results and a spectacle of explosions, trees, and more.
NVIDIA’s 257.15 drivers did a lot to improve Bad Company 2 performance, a very necessary thing given the GTX 400 series’ original poor showing at the game. As a result the gap is shorter than it once was, but the GTX 465 still takes it on the chin here. With an increase in resolution comes an increase in the gap between the GTX 465 and the 5850, starting at 9% and culminating at 23%. If NVIDIA can work a bit more out of their drivers the GTX 465 may close the gap at 1680, but it’s still going to be pretty far behind at any higher resolutions. NVIDIA does have an advantage here when it comes to image quality (specifically, anti-aliasing), which will jump in to with our comprehensive review of the 257.15 drivers later this week.
As for the GTX 470 versus the GTX 465, the GTX 465 stays within 78% and 84% of its bigger sibling.
Meanwhile the Waterfall benchmark repeats something we saw on our initial GTX 480 review: NVIDIA does better than AMD when it comes to minimum framerates. We’ve been able to rule out a Video RAM advantage here thanks in part to the use of 1GB of VRAM on the GTX 465, so we have to look elsewhere to explain this. At this point we believe we may be shader bound, which would be to the GTX 465’s advantage.
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poohbear - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
Why's the 5770 10fps slower than the 4870? is that a mistake? they perform on par especially w/ the recent driver updates for the 5770.poohbear - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
in mass effect 2.:p hate the no edit feature!Ryan Smith - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
There aren't any typos; those are the results we got for those cards on the 10.3a drivers.temps - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
I can vouch for that. When my 1gb 4870 died, it was replaced with a 5770. In ME2, I saw a 10-15fps drop across the board with the same settings.. that didn't do it for me, so I ended up stepping up to a 5850.BoFox - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
Didn't you know that the 5770 is generally slower than 4870? The 4870 has far, far greater memory bandwidth despite a 100MHz lower core clock.tno - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
I think a repost to the feed is appropriate when someone goes through this again and polishes it up. I couldn't finish the second paragraph it was so full or mistakes. Really guys there is no shame in hiring a copy editor.softdrinkviking - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
i don't care about typos in this kind of article.aside from problems with the numbers, i think everyone knows what is meant.
i feel like it's expected that tech blog sites are littered with typos.
actually, i'd like to hear about this from ryan smith or somebody here.
do you guys want us to post typo corrections in the comments?
i don't care, but what does anandtech want?
taltamir - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
According to the graph, the GTX465 gets 89 C not 91 C.
taltamir - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
nevermind, I see now that there are two graphs, one for furmark and one for crysis.multivac - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
NVIDIA filled in the first 2 spots in their lineup with the GTX 480 and GTX 480, with obvious room to grow out the family in the future.end of the first paragraph.
still reading but im sure its a great article
cheers!