GTX 465 review ... one more shoe from NV drops

[MrK6]

I don't know why people complain about the mid-range cards. I agree that there's a lack of options around $200, is that what the problem is? I think 5770's for $130 is a damn good deal, proportional to 4890's for $160, which was probably the best graphics card bang-for-your-buck in the last five years. The fact that prices were maintained even after the economy supposedly got back on track is commendable, or maybe we're just all spoiled now after the 2008-2009 price wars.

 

[Scali]

I guess most people already realized that this is a minification issue, where BenSkywalker argues from a magnification issue point-of-view.
My reference to the possibility of gray pixels obviously referred to the fact that mipmaps are box-filtered down, and the smallest mipmap for a checkerboard texture will be a 1x1 gray pixel.
As soon as you get to the point where you reach the level of minification where you require the smallest mipmap, the gray appearance is perfectly valid and expected behaviour.
And if you look at the progression of the texture from near to far, you see that the gray occurs at exactly the point where your textureixel ratio approaches 1. So there is no indication of cheating.

The irony of it all is that because of some of the things I wrote on my developer blog, I was accused of being an Intel/nVidia fanboy... yet here I am defending AMD against some crackpot theories from nVidia fanboys.
Although I was actually defending the GTX465 in this thread because the reviewers didn't turn on certain optimizations that they did turn on for AMD. Make of it what you will, but I've always strived for being hard but fair and unbiased towards companies.

Scali, you can see that folks in here are trying to get the thread back on topic. Give them a hand, would you?
Anandtech Moderator - Keysplayr

 

[v8envy]

I don't know why people complain about the mid-range cards. I agree that there's a lack of options around $200, is that what the problem is? I think 5770's for $130 is a damn good deal, proportional to 4890's for $160, which was probably the best graphics card bang-for-your-buck in the last five years. The fact that prices were maintained even after the economy supposedly got back on track is commendable, or maybe we're just all spoiled now after the 2008-2009 price wars.

Lower performance for the same $ for mainstream cards about 12 months down the road doesn't make people happy. Especially when you consider new, demanding games have been released during those 12 months. That $160 4890 would handle anything other than Crysis at 1920x1080 with highest settings, the same can not be said for the $130 5770 today.

There's still a vast price and performance gap between the $130 5770 and the $290 5850, so someone looking for more performance than a $150 budget mainstream card and $300 lower enthusiast card is stuck with the choice of too feeble for 2010 or too expensive. I consider the 5830 performance equivalent to an overclocked 5770, so while it fills the gap pricing wise it does so simply by being a terrible value.

 

[MrK6]

Lower performance for the same $ for mainstream cards about 12 months down the road doesn't make people happy. Especially when you consider new, demanding games have been released during those 12 months. That $160 4890 would handle anything other than Crysis at 1920x1080 with highest settings, the same can not be said for the $130 5770 today.

And that's why it's $130. $130 card that can handle most games cranked at 1680x1050 and some at 1920x1080? On top of that, it's a decent overclocker and has zippo power draw? The 5770 is a good deal at $130, I think people became spoiled during the price wars and forgot how much computer hardware usually goes for.

There's still a vast price and performance gap between the $130 5770 and the $290 5850, so someone looking for more performance than a $150 budget mainstream card and $300 lower enthusiast card is stuck with the choice of too feeble for 2010 or too expensive. I consider the 5830 performance equivalent to an overclocked 5770, so while it fills the gap pricing wise it does so simply by being a terrible value.

So I was correct in assuming that people are looking for something in the $200 range. I agree that the 5830 isn't a good value. While onsale, it's getting below $200, it should really be around $175 I think. And while this GTX465 is rather lame, I think NVIDIA's GF104 might offer something for the $200 folk (and it very well might not, we'll see).

 

[FragKrag]

I'm not sure where the $130 5770 is coming from, but I bet it's a shody Powercolor with one of those terrible coolers, which I doubt would actually fare well with overclocking. I really hate it when people mention how GPU A is cheaper than GPU B and can be better than GPU A when overclocked. Really makes no sense to me since GPU B can be overclocked as well -_-

As far as the GTX 465 goes, if it was priced around $240-250 I think I would actually hop on as long as the nonreference cooling is able to keep it below 90ishC at load. At $280, I really have no idea what Nvidia is trying to do. Selling what seems to be an underfeatured card with what seems to be lackluster performance at $280 is just insane.

I was really looking forward to the HD 5830 and GTX 465 because they would both be in my price range, yet both of them can't even or barely keep up with their predecessors. That said, it seems that 5830 prices are indeed dropping to what may be reasonable levels ($200-210), and I might pick one up if GF104 ends up being disappointing and HD 4890s are out of stock by then.

 

[GaiaHunter]

I'm not sure where the $130 5770 is coming from, but I bet it's a shody Powercolor with one of those terrible coolers, which I doubt would actually fare well with overclocking.

I don't know where this powercolor hate come from - I've a nice 4850 PCS+ that runs quite cool/silent, and while it doesn't OC very well in the ram, it's core been on 720 with np for a year now.