![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Monday , July 12, 2010
- Author:
- Mark Warner
- Editor:
- Brent Justice
- Google +1
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 Review
Today NVIDIA is answering the demands of money conscious gamers by introducing the new GeForce GTX 460. The GTX 460 is a refinement of the Fermi architecture, designed to land significant performance improvements for gamers resting in the $200 USD sweet spot. We will find out if this truly does deliver gaming bliss on the cheap and why NVIDIA is calling the GTX 460 an "Overclocker’s Dream."
ARMA II: Operation Arrowhead
ARMA II: Operation Arrowhead is a military simulator developed by Bohemia Interactive, featuring realistic simulations of battles in a fictional middle-eastern nation called Takistan. During our testing, we found that optimizing performance in Operation Arrowhead was less about improving framerates, and more about improving the responsiveness of controls. With high settings, we sometimes observed relatively high framerates even when there was so much input lag and choppiness that the game was simply not playable. For our testing scenario, we loaded up the single-player scenario called "A Walk in the Hills", in which our Army unit was sent to investigate sightings of armed militia in a small desert village.
Highest Playable Settings
In ARMA II, we found that the increased memory and memory bus width on the GTX 460 1GB did not give it a performance advantage over the 768MB version. We observed identical performance between both models. The Radeon HD 5830, on the other hand, was a good deal less capable. We had to lower the visibility setting by about 200 to get it playable, and even still, it gave us significantly lower framerates.
Framerates were admirable with both GTX 460s, but again, the raw framerate is not the most important performance characteristic for ARMA II: Operation Arrowhead. Control responsiveness can suffer when the system is overloaded, even if the reported framerates are high. This indicates that Operation Arrowhead is not particularly GPU-bound, though it is certainly demanding.
Apples to Apples
For this test, we wanted to see how adding AA to the scene affects performance in Operation Arrowhead. This test was performed with the GeForce GTX 460 1GB video card at 1680x1050 with 16X AF enabled, and using the highest playable settings from above. The second test run simply added 2X AA.
We can see that adding AA to this game affects performance in a big way. We lost 28% of our average framerate just for 2X AA.