Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
GeForce GTX 460 $200 GPU launches
AmazingAvery
Age of Conan AdvocateMember UncommonPosts: 7,188
in Hardware
If you are thinking about upgrading your GPU and maybe you have budgeted $200 ish for your graphics card, you might want to consider the GTX 460 that launched today. Plenty of positive reviews around the web.
My pick to read would be anandtechs review which is quite indepth: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3809/nvidias-geforce-gtx-460-the-200-king/18
The price to power of the card makes me eager to find out about the GF106 & 108 parts to come now.
Just a heads up to anyone looking to upgrade. ATi would surely have to drop the price of the 5830 now it doesn't match up well for the price.
Finally decent competiton. Consumer wins.
Comments
Nice deal for those not lookign to spend a ton of money on a DX11 card. I just got me a GTX465 and I'm enjoying the fermi cards.
It is not as much fail as the other fermi cards in regards to temperature, power, and transistor usage. Its also priced well inbetween the HD5770 and HD5830. This is about where it performs. If you were going to buy a nVidia card this generation, it would be the one to get. However, you cannot deny for $20 more you can get a faster performing card in the HD5830.
You blind or in denial? The 768MB version out performs the 5830 and cost less and the 1GB version is right on the tail of the 5850 while costing significantly less...
Im going to upgrade my rig soon, and this is such good news!
Maybe i'll go sli with it. Hopefully ATI will drop their prices for the 58xx series too!
Only thing is sandy bridge spoil the party :'(
RIP Orc Choppa
I was gonna blow my bonus on a pair of GeForce 9800 GX2 for my rig,
then my darn car blew up
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ab/Norsefire-logo.png
In every aspect for this price it performs better than any ATi card "regards to temperature, power, and transistor usage" for $20 more you can get the 1GB version and 10% better performance. ATI is forced the lower the price.
I have to say, these are very impressive cards.
That said, there are some important caveats to note regarding Anandtech's review.
First The 5830 has had enough time to drop in price that it's now the same $199 as the GTX460 anyways, and secondly, other review sites do not show the massive advantage in performance from the GTX460 that Anandtech does.
Here's Guru3d's review, here and note that the $199 768MB GTX460 and 5830 are neck and neck in just about every title (aside from Farcry 2, that aweful outlier in Nvidia's favor), and the small differences come out with both the 5830 and GTX460 on top in a roughly even number of titles.
Tom's Hardware shows the same thing as Guru3d, here, with CoD4 favoring the GTX460 considerably (does anyone even care about an old DX9 game anymore anyways?), and Crysis favoring the 5830 by almost as big of a margin, and then the 768mb 460 and the 5830 just trade off single frame-per-second victories in various games.
Anandtech's review may show the 460 being noteably faster on all models, but that just isn't true. Anandtech has obviously just not done their testing very well, frankly.
The one thing the GTX460 does have going for it is that it seems to run a little cooler, though neither runs particularly hot, and both have comparable power draw.
If anything, it's not the 5830 that's in trouble here, but rather the 5850, which should honestly be closer to $250 given what this cheaper cards can do. In fact, the 5850, 470, 5870 and 480 all seem to give less performance for the money than these slightly lower budget cards, and while that was acceptable as the "price for premium performance" at one time, the fact that you could SLI 2 5830s or 460s for $400, and completely BLOW AWAY the $400 Radeon HD 5870 or $500 Geforce GTX 480 means it's honestly hard to not recommend doing so. It's just like how the 5770 at release was barely over $150, and two of them ($300) matched the $400+ 5870.
Lower-end cards are getting to be a much better way to go, especially because now rather than investing a premium in higher-end cards that give less for the money, you can just scale the number of lower end cards to your needs (and 3 card solutions are actually becoming more and more supported as time goes on as well).
No, Cypress is still far more energy efficent at load and for transistor usage is arguable, HD 5850 is faster than a GTX 460 1GB.
Most are different games , different time demos, different settings, AAx4, no AA etc..., apples to oranges.
Crysis and Crysis Warhead are optimized differently, everyone knows this.
And when it is the same games with similar settings you will find Anandtech falls in line more or less with other sites. Of course you will have a few discrepancies, since everyone is running different setups.
Battlefield Bad Company 2:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3809/nvidias-geforce-gtx-460-the-200-king/11
http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-460-review/16
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-460-gf104-fermi,2684-12.html
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/geforce_gtx_460_performance_preview/page11.asp
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2010/07/12/nvidia-geforce-gtx-460-768mb-gpu-review/10
Dirt 2:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3809/nvidias-geforce-gtx-460-the-200-king/13
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-460-gf104-fermi,2684-11.html
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/geforce_gtx_460_performance_preview/page6.asp
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2010/07/12/nvidia-geforce-gtx-460-768mb-gpu-review/7
How many people care about COD4: Modern Warfare 2? A lot > http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
Across all the benches from all other sites you will find the 460 768MB more often than not is above the 5830. The 5830 needs to be around $180 and 5850 $250 for ATI to compete.
There's just one problem here, bud. Modern Warfare 2 is COD6, not COD4 (which is Modern Warfare 1, and the game I was commenting on). It might help you to get your titles straight, first off
Secondly, when it comes to graphical requirements, no one does care about COD4, because these days a $100 video card can max out that game at 1080P and deliver decent framerates (and yes, I've personally done it).
Beyond that, when you filter results that remove or seriously reduce AA (and honestly, who doesn't play with AA enabled on a $200 card?), that removes a lot of the tests favoring the GTX460. In fact, I note that both Anandtech and Firing Squad refused to go above 4x AA in their Dirt 2 testing. If the 5830 suddenly matches or passes the 460 when you ramp the AA up to the level people will actually be playing at (because honestly, the difference between 4x and 8x is more than worth 5fps), then don't you think that's rather important information to include? The sites that used 8x in their testing showed just that.
For bad company two, Only Anandtech and Firingsquad show any kind of advantage for the GTX460. Tom's Hardware, Bit-tech, Guru3d, HardOCP, and Hardware Canucks show no such thing. When five show the two cards neck and neck, and only two show some supposed giant advantage for the 460, I'm inclined to call those two tests outliers. Now, if you can find more sites that agree with Anandtech, that might change things, but I think that pretty much sums up the list of serious review sites, at least as far as ones that presently have GTX460 reviews and cover these two games (Overclocks Club doesn't have those titles in its review, even if they have a review).
For the most part (even within much of Firing Squad's review) the cards perform comparably in tested titles. Now, as for your comment about the 5850, your singling out of Ati needing to reduce its price to compete with Nvidia when Nvidia would also have to reduce the price of the GTX470 by that same logic makes me question your objectivity, to be frank. Ati and Nvidia BOTH need to consider reductions to their higher end for those cards to remain competitive. You act like because Nvidia has produced ONE (I say again, ONE) good-performing card in its entire Fermi line, that suddenly Ati is having trouble competing, when in fact their Cypress lineup beats Nvidia at every other price point, hands down, with cards that have equal or better value, and vastly better TDP. It should be apparent that it's not ATI that still has work to do to become competitive; quite the reverse.
for the extra $100 i'll go with a HD 5850 thanks, much better card.
Honestly, I did not read the reviews on Anandtech. I read the reviews on the other tech sites first that all put these cards in competitive range of the HD5830 that reduced its price to $200. Over the past 4 years, ATI's have also had better driver performance gains. Such as the HD4770 now being better then the 9800GT, when the same spec cards in 2007 (HD3870, 8800GT) had nVidia with a 15% advantage.
I have to give props, nVidia finally has a competitive card after ATI released Cypress nearly a year ago. Bad news is ATIs Southern Islands is around the corner, and a faster iteration from ATI comes this Quarter. But then again Southern Islands is a new architecture and that could fail miserably.
Tom only benchmarked Modern Warfare 2... What game are you on about?
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-460-gf104-fermi,2684-8.html
You need to understand they all bench different parts of the game... The two cards do compare in performance since they're are in competition but the 768MB is far more often infront of the 5830 then not. There is a significant performance hit when enabling 8xAA and you're hardly going to notice a difference while gaming from 4xAA... I beg to differ people don't buy a midrange card to enable 8xAA or above just like they don't buy one to play at 2560x1600 res. Its a midrange card.
I was using those examples to show there isn't a great discrepancy across the sites, and Dirt 2 is notorious to perform better on Nvidia hardware enabling 8xAA will cause the 5830 to tank even more.
I never hinted to the point ATI are in trouble and i agree 470 needs to be reduced and the 5870, 480 etc.. but there is always a premium the higher end you go. I wouldn't disagree if someone recommend a 5870 over either the 470 and 480 its the better buy, but for the $200 range i can't recommend anything else bar the 460 not until ATI lower the price of the competition or when Southern Island is rolled out.
8xAA benchmarks are not really valid to benchmark performance on Cypress currently. Just discovered a problem with ATIs recent WHQL certified drivers that make ATIs not able to perform at 8xAA. Its definetly a dent in the cap for ATIs drivers, but would not be a fair estimate of overall performance to have a bug be a major factor in where a card stands.
I was sifting through a lot of review sites; clearly I didn't keep track of who was reviewing what adequately. Nevertheless, there is no game titled "Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2"
As I suppose this counts as an oops for both of us, and it's splitting hairs anyways, let's move on 
You need to understand they all bench different parts of the game... The two cards do compare in performance since they're are in competition but the 768MB is far more often infront of the 5830 then not. There is a significant performance hit when enabling 8xAA and you're hardly going to notice a difference while gaming from 4xAA... I beg to differ people don't buy a midrange card to enable 8xAA or above just like they don't buy one to play at 2560x1600 res. Its a midrange card.
Again, the 460 does not end up in front of the 5830 across the sum of games run by the review sites, except in two outlier cases. I don't know why Anandtech and Firingsquad were not able to get the relative performance out of the 5830 that EVERY OTHER review site was able to, whether it just be coincidental products of them testing games at places and settings that the card did bad in, or because of a flaw in their setup, or because of a flaw in their methodology (though failing to keep down the margin of error shouldn't give such a consistently low result so I'm not inclined to point there), but whatever the reason, especially in light of the fact that I'm not sure what that reason is, I'm inclinded to do what I was always taught to do in basic statistics: ignore the extreme outliers. A mean average of the difference in performance might come out in favor of the 460 due to those two outliers, but a median average does not, and the typical review site shows them neck and neck.
Also, Tom's Hardware and Guru3d shows that these cards are more than capable of running DiRT2 at 8x AA, even at 1920x1200 resolution. a hair under 50fps is hardly bad for a racing game, and if the difference between no AA and 8x AA is only 15fps, then the difference between 4x AA and 8 AA is going to be what, half that? alright, so 7 or 8fps. That is not going to be even remotely noticeable when you're talking about the difference between about 45 and 52. I literally doubt a typical human would be able to discern the difference. The difference in AA, however, has points where it is noticeable, as I noted when playing DiRT 2.
I was using those examples to show there isn't a great discrepancy across the sites, and Dirt 2 is notorious to perform better on Nvidia hardware enabling 8xAA will cause the 5830 to tank even more.
Tom's Hardware tested at 8x AA, and the Ati hardware edged out the Nvidia hardware, so obviously this isn't true. In fact, Guru3d gave the opposite explanation: the 768mb frame buffer on the 460 couldn't handle 8x AA in their testing (yet at 4x, the 5830 still outperformed the 768mb 460).
In fact, Guru3d might be onto something. I DO notice that the tests where the 5830 matches the 460 seem to be when the 758mb frame buffer overloads, usually at 1080P, and often with AA enabled. This might explain some of the discrepencies.
I never hinted to the point ATI are in trouble and i agree 470 needs to be reduced and the 5870, 480 etc.. but there is always a premium the higher end you go. I wouldn't disagree if someone recommend a 5870 over either the 470 and 480 its the better buy, but for the $200 range i can't recommend anything else bar the 460 not until ATI lower the price of the competition or when Southern Island is rolled out.
Well, as long as there's no cause to disagree on the 470. Like I said though, in an age of very mature dual-GPU solutions (and rapidly emerging performance on the tri-GPU front), how can you excuse higher prices by saying it's the premium for high-end products? When you can simply SLI/Crossfire the lower end cards and surpass the higher end cards for less money, that stops being a valid excuse, at least to the customer, real fast.
This also brings up another point. Looking more closely, I now believe the 460 outperforms the 5830, but chokes quickly on a 768mb frame buffer when you try to actually take advantage of its GPU power (because these cards really can run games a 1080P with decent or even high AA enabled and get well over 40fps). If that really is the case, then the 460 would find a fine niche with consumers with monitors that don't go above, say 1440x900 or maybe 1680x1050, but frame buffer demand has only gone up (hence I'd be wary for the future even at 1680x1050), so for users with 1080P monitors, there's just NO WAY I'd recommend the 768mb 460 over the 1GB 5830. Also, this means that for dual-GPU setups, which only use the frame buffer of the master card, the 768MB 460 is basically a non-option, because that's enough of a difference in frame buffer size that your 2 GPUs would out-pace the frame buffer much more quickly than happens on 1GB cards.
So if the discrepency really does come from the 460 choking on too little memory, then at $199, Ati's 5830 is still easy to recommend over it for a number of users (but the reverse also becomes true). I still think the 5830 can compete at the price range, however... not that I'd complain if Ati wanted to drop those prices.
On another note, if AMD is still promising that Southern Islands will be out not just this year, but in the fall, then can one really recommend the 460 or 5830? In a few short months, the $200 price range is going to have much better options, and both of these cards will drop in price... or at least the 5830 will
Of course, the fact that it takes Nvidia a year to come up with a competitive product, with Ati's next killer product right on its coattails (for which Nvidia doubtless has no response) really makes me wonder how much longer Nvidia is even going to be around... not that a GPU monopoly will be good for anyone.
TSMC's 28nm process has been delayed and Global Foundries is ahead of schedule in their 28nm conversion. Both won't happen until 2011 or late 2010, and Southern Islands is dependant on the 28nm production. Chances are the one in fall will be a faster iteration of the current offerings from AMD.
You're not confusing Souther Islands with Northern Islands, are you?
It's Northern Islands that's the completely new GPU setup, while Southern Islands is a stop-gap, a mix of tech between Cypress and Northern Islands. Southern Islands will still use the 40nm TMSC.
Last I heard, Southern Islands was right on track for release, while Northern Islands is somewhere out in 2011. In any case, this does not put Nvidia in a good spot. It's hard to believe that only a few short years ago they were plastering the market with the G80 line.
I thought that 32nm was the next step?
Anyways.... wait for the GTX 475, it's the souped up version of the GTX 460 and due in Q3.
All those memories will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
Its full-node verse half-node. Processors use full-node which is 45nm - 32nm - 22nm. Most other chips use half-node. 55nm - 40nm - 28nm. Yea I probably have them confused. Still the G80 has not proved to be that good over time compared to the G92. After the awards and accalades of the G80, the problems were shown. It failed to utilize DX10 according to Microsoft's conditions. It had a high failure rate. Its temperature and power draw where high.
Ah, I see... but I could have sworn that Intel have been showing both 28nm and 22nm in it's future roadmap.
And why are you suddenly talking about the old G80 chip or did you mean the GT200 chip?
All those memories will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
wasnt the 5850 suppose to be 260 ish at release and the places like newegg jacked the prices up?
Its more a mutual jacking up the price by retailers and manufacturers. AMD intended the HD5870 to be $300ish. ASUS and Newegg intended the HD5870 to be $400ish because the consumer did not have much of a choice, they were in high demand, and there was no competition.
The G80 is very similar to Fermi. High temps, high power draws, and fails to meet standards set. Its inadvisable to trust a company proposing a similar product that will probably have similar issues.
Well, we've got our first hint of a reaction, I suppose. It just remains to be seen if this price change ripples through to other models on both sides of the fence.
A Modest Proposal for MMORPGs:
That the means of progression would not be mutually exclusive from the means of enjoyment.
My advice to everyone.
If you feel like entering Player vs Environment games and have a game that you already love to play, the GTX 460s will help...yet only to a certain point.
Your upgrade path should be to reach a level you can run 1920x1080 (HD resolution) and hope your games run well at that resolution. However, you should consider a different angle if you wish to enter PvP based gaming in persistent worlds.
You will need a lot more memory and bandwith to deal in large scale PvP environments because of the way the player is processed by a server. The first piece of advice I give out to anyone buying a 460 is to pay the extra money to have 1GB VRAM and skip the 768MB version.
Something that no site has which I have read are actual VRAM memory drain itself on different games played. When I play Modern Warfare 2 on Maximum settings on 1920x1080, the actual VRAM drain is 800 - 900MB in some of the special ops maps. I've had maps reach 1100MB VRAM consumption. I play of a 480 GTX SC.
SLI scales well on the 460s, but I rather buy 1 480 GTX than buying two 460s for many reasons. The 480s run on 1536MB of memory and as soon as a game with some eye candy break the memory limit, SLI or no SLI your framerate gets zapped.
As far as overclocking goes, Overclocking the card by a lot to get 20% more performance which amounts in top games to around 5 - 10 Frames Per Second really isnt advisable. Overclocking is good on TOP cards where one already has a High Gain to start and Overclocking a bit gives a higher gain at a lower percentage as far as framerates go.