GeForce GTX 580 vs. GeForce GTX 460 1GB SLI @ [H]

WorldExclusive said:
Nice Review. Hard choice though, GTX 460SLI is cheaper but the GTX 580 has a better upgrade path which is very expensive.
On a 2560x1600(1440) monitor I'd go with the GTX 580(more memory) and on a 1080p monitor I'd go with GTX 460SLI.
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I agree with this assessment! +1
 
Thanks for the review but I must say, this does not paint the whole picture since it does not include all the options available in the market. Drawing any conclusions with regards to value with incomplete data is premature at best.

Will wait for the 6850 and 6870 crossfire comparison for the real picture to take shape. Considering the 6850 is such an amazing overclocker I can see it offsetting the slightly increased cost specially when a pair of 6850s in crossfire at stock clocks are faster than highly overclocked GTX460s and still much cheaper than a GTX580.
 
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SpeedyVV said:
Kyle, any chance of a article about these same cards and what CPUs do to performance?

Would love to see, Core2Duo, Core2Quad, i3,i5,i7, X2, X3,X4,X6.

There is so much FUD out there regarding CPU\GPU bottlenecking.
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While this is not exactly new, if you spend some time with it, I think your questions will be answered.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article/2009/05/19/real_world_gameplay_cpu_scaling/


Lorien said:
Thanks for the review but I must say, this does not paint the whole picture since it does not include all the options available in the market. Drawing any conclusions with regards to value with incomplete data is premature at best.

Will wait for the 6850 and 6870 crossfire comparison for the real picture to take shape. Considering the 6850 is such an amazing overclocker I can see it offsetting the slightly increased cost specially when a pair of 6850s in crossfire at stock clocks are faster than highly overclocked GTX460s and still much cheaper than a GTX580.
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If we had that brush, we would be painting with it.
 
I've considered SLI for a long time. I didn't know about the inconsistent frame rates, however. Has this always been the case for SLI? As great as high frames would be, there's no point if the fluctuations are noticeable.
 
OMG SOMETHING NEW TO READ BRB!

-and done
Very nice review, but I will be very happy when Civ V finishes it's rounds in the [H] testing arena's. The way the framed jump around and plumet to 0, well, just looks bad on the graphs. Until I see that it's Civ V, I always think they are haveing serious problems with a game or driver or something.
 
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SXO said:
AMD cards can do Eyefinity with a single card, so obviously the limitation isn't insurmountable. I think nVidia is purposely leaving in this limitation to push people to buy a 2nd card unnecessarily.
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Even nVidia isn't that haughty. At the end of the day it comes down to AMD offers that functionality and nVidia doesn't- any potential customers interested in that functionality are going to take that into consideration, and right now the GTX 580 is in the $500 price bracket for a top-end card.

Honestly, I think nVidia was blindsided by Eyefinity and its success. NVSurround was a quickly cobbled-together response. From what I've heard, it's actually a pretty good solution, and provided you have SLI compares favorably to Eyefinity- but that's mostly software, an area where imo nVidia has always done well (mileage may vary xD).

Looking at the GTX 580, I think the most telling element is the lack of bitstreaming audio. It's an oddity and anomaly because the lower-end GTX 460 supports it and is GF104 versus GF110. But GF110 just isn't what you'd traditionally think it to be- in some senses, it may well be less than a refresh. The GTX 580 is just a refined GTX 480, that's all, so any expectations for it to add features...

But that's fine with me personally as the GTX 480 would have been appealing to me right now if... well xD The GTX 580 basically did what it needed to do in order to make me take such a card into consideration.

Redsnake77 said:
Great article! What I'd like to see next is a comparison between single and multiple screens. How much graphical detail / quality do you have to sacrifice to maintain playable framerates when going from one to three monitors?
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Check my first quote on why that comparison can't happen.

Injuis said:
I've considered SLI for a long time. I didn't know about the inconsistent frame rates, however. Has this always been the case for SLI? As great as high frames would be, there's no point if the fluctuations are noticeable.
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#3 issue with multi-card set-ups next to micro-stutter and compatibility. This was the reason I moved away from 8800GTS 640mb SLI within a month of maneuvering into it (ended up working fairly well as I bought an 8800GTS 640mb SSC- the one with 112 stream processors- to SLI with my original 8800GTS 640mb; managed to sell the original for enough so that I only took a slight loss on the SSC and that held me until I made my next build with a GTX 280).

Anyway, I think of it more as, you're trying to get more performance out of a card than it was really designed for. The GTX 460 is an interesting example, because it performs exceptionally well under such conditions, yet if it were truly designed for them we wouldn't have the three variants be "GTX 460 1GB, GTX 460 768MB, and GTX 460 SE", but rather "GTX 460 1GB and GTX 460 1.5GB"- likely with some better reference cooling and higher-end memory modules on the 1.5GB version. But still, despite having two cards, you have a lot of limitations where the second card just doesn't matter, and so it just seems a more common occurrence that you can be riding high at the performance level of a much beefier card and then come crashing down to "reality".
 
Kyle,

You mentioned, on the first game, that the FPS spread was "tighter" with the 5870. That could be easily quantified with simple standard deviation analysis done in excel. Secondarily looking at median value will also further prove your point. This gets rid of bill gates effect. If the median drifts far from the mean (especially to a smaller number). Mode analysis could also be added in. A simple cut and paste of data into excel will make this numbers quickly avaible.

More succiently, a small standard deviation, median/mode near the mean should indicate "smoother" overall gameplay once you achieve a minimum level (lets say 30-40 FPS) and corroborate your real world tests.
 
Trepidati0n said:
Kyle,

You mentioned, on the first game, that the FPS spread was "tighter" with the 5870. That could be easily quantified with simple standard deviation analysis done in excel. Secondarily looking at median value will also further prove your point. This gets rid of bill gates effect. If the median drifts far from the mean (especially to a smaller number). Mode analysis could also be added in. A simple cut and paste of data into excel will make this numbers quickly avaible.

More succiently, a small standard deviation, median/mode near the mean should indicate "smoother" overall gameplay once you achieve a minimum level (lets say 30-40 FPS) and corroborate your real world tests.
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Yeah, or we could just tell you it was tighter.
 
He's just saying it would be nice to have it as a quantifiable number, rather than just your oppinion. Not that we don't trust you or anything? :D

We do trust him right?
 
Good review. I thought it was enjoyable to read. I agree with other posters that a GTX 1gb sli setup at 1920x1200 is a great value.

As far as the 6870 crossfire or 6850 crossfire.

I think to compile articles together perhaps you guys should do a multi card shootout article all in one

GTX 460 1gb oc SLi vs 6850 1gb oc Crossfire X and GTX 470 SLi vs 6870 Crossfire X all in one review
 
SXO said:
AMD cards can do Eyefinity with a single card, so obviously the limitation isn't insurmountable. I think nVidia is purposely leaving in this limitation to push people to buy a 2nd card unnecessarily.
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Yes but it's a hardware change. The GF100 (4xx series) was already set in stone when AMD announced Eyefinity and until then multi-monitor gaming wasn't popular. Only a handful of people played games that way, and really I don't think the GPU power was there. The GF110 is a derivative of the GF100 so I am assuming that the change would be too big to add on to the card at this time. These cards only have two RAMDACs, so they can only output to two monitors - DisplayPort lets you get around that issue, which is why Eyefinity requires a DP connection.

I'm sure in NVIDIA's next big hardware revision they will include this.
 
5*General said:
Honestly, I think nVidia was blindsided by Eyefinity and its success. NVSurround was a quickly cobbled-together response. From what I've heard, it's actually a pretty good solution, and provided you have SLI compares favorably to Eyefinity- but that's mostly software, an area where imo nVidia has always done well (mileage may vary xD).
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NVSurround is anything but a quickly cobbled-together response. I've used both Eyefinity (CF 5870s) and NVSurround (SLI GTX580s, currently in use) and the software for handling NVSurround is more refined than Eyefinity, which is sad. The Bezel Correction and handling of multiple monitors is better on NVIDIA than ATI and the game support is basically identical.

NVSurround isn't as good as Eyefinity in the sense that it requires SLI, but the software and support it provides is (IMO) better than ATI's.
 
Ok, so I have been keeping a pretty close eye on this battle. My concern, although small, is that I am running a corsair tx750 power supply, an asus m3n-ht motherboard w/ onboard gpu, an amd x4 9950be, and whatever else for my dvd and hard drives - not major.... my concern is that I'm wondering how having a dual 460sli setup will work with my PSU limitation, or if I should just spend the extra loot to get the 580. i have tried using some online TDP calculators and I'm still not certain if 750 is really enough for two 460's... hell, I have enough room to run 3 but then my pcie bus cuts down from x16 to x8 so that would be pretty dumb. I use my onboard gpu to process physx, maybe if someone recommends I turn it off completely i will, but this setup seems to get me some sweet frame rates in FC2 Crysis and C:WH - i will be looking to pick up a few new titles like AVP, and Rage whenever that comes out- also Duke Nukem 4ever if it DOES come out next year... i know a 460 sli or 580 would dominate these games, but i'm leaning towards the 460 sli simply just because its logical... let me know what you current 460 sli owners think in terms of TDP because im gonna be pretty bummed if I get this setup and i ahve to spend the extra loot anyway on a new psu.
 
Rizen said:
NVSurround is anything but a quickly cobbled-together response. I've used both Eyefinity (CF 5870s) and NVSurround (SLI GTX580s, currently in use) and the software for handling NVSurround is more refined than Eyefinity, which is sad. The Bezel Correction and handling of multiple monitors is better on NVIDIA than ATI and the game support is basically identical.

NVSurround isn't as good as Eyefinity in the sense that it requires SLI, but the software and support it provides is (IMO) better than ATI's.
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Case and point really. It was a quickly-cobbled-together response done well courtesy of nVidia's strong software support. But they weren't able to, and haven't since been able to, take the requisite time to fully develop that into their hardware for a proper response- it's a partial solution atm. Don't get me wrong, it's a partial solution that works pretty well and more or less makes sense (right now I'm running two monitors of different size- I don't expect that to change for quite a bit, so any change on that front would easily facilitate a second GTX 580 or whatever), but it does leave nVidia relatively lacking at various price points (seems a ghastly proposition, but considering I had a friend running Eyefinity off a single HD 5770 on three 1280x1024 monitors...).
 
5*General said:
Case and point really. It was a quickly-cobbled-together response done well courtesy of nVidia's strong software support. But they weren't able to, and haven't since been able to, take the requisite time to fully develop that into their hardware for a proper response- it's a partial solution atm. Don't get me wrong, it's a partial solution that works pretty well and more or less makes sense (right now I'm running two monitors of different size- I don't expect that to change for quite a bit, so any change on that front would easily facilitate a second GTX 580 or whatever), but it does leave nVidia relatively lacking at various price points (seems a ghastly proposition, but considering I had a friend running Eyefinity off a single HD 5770 on three 1280x1024 monitors...).
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I actually agree with you. It's true, nvidia hasn't done the necessary to get the hardware to be able to do nv surround on a single card. It's possible, they need to add display port and another dac or modify to get that working. Although Nv surround is cool, Eyefinity does have the hardware advantage. 1 6970 should be fine for 3x 1680x1050 surround where as you need 2 GTX 460s or 2 of anything nvidia's to even do that.
 
Trepidati0n said:
Kyle,

You mentioned, on the first game, that the FPS spread was "tighter" with the 5870. That could be easily quantified with simple standard deviation analysis done in excel. Secondarily looking at median value will also further prove your point. This gets rid of bill gates effect. If the median drifts far from the mean (especially to a smaller number). Mode analysis could also be added in. A simple cut and paste of data into excel will make this numbers quickly avaible.

More succiently, a small standard deviation, median/mode near the mean should indicate "smoother" overall gameplay once you achieve a minimum level (lets say 30-40 FPS) and corroborate your real world tests.
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the whole point of these reviews are based off the game playing experience, not benchmarks. and trying to numerically quantify a certain aspect is really encroaching on that philosophy. if the effect had not be noticeable it would not even been brought up or they would have stated that they couldn't tell the difference. and in this review they are pretty well having to split hairs hear and there to make the distinctions
 
Awesome review. I love how you discuss the average framerates, but also how it feels in the game.

Also, I am really happy that I went with 460SLI when I did. They handle a nice OC really well and at a great price.
 
Good review Brent. Nice to see where my 460 SLI setup stands. I could probably dig it up and see how the 460's scale by clocks, but I'm interested in seeing how an overclocked setup of 460's compares to a stock 580. I know it wouldn't really be fair to compare OC'd 460's vs a reference 580 so i'm not saying you should have done it, but so many people have factory or user overclocked 460's that I'm curious.
 
Great review, I was curious how these two setups would do against each other. Would have been interesting to see a power consumption comparison, but I suppose they're similar, both idle and load.

One comment: if the biggest bottleneck for GTX460SLI is the framebuffer, then why not buy 2GB cards for 2560x1600 or the multimonitor setups? AFAIK the 2GB versions cost something like 15-20% more, which keeps the SLI config still a lot cheaper than the GTX580.
 
Brent,
What was your subjective opinion regarding the noise level between the two setups?

Granted, most folks would be using overclocked 460's, which would change the comparison, but I'm interested in your impressions.
 
pandora's box said:
nice article as usual. would have been nice to see 5850 crossfire performance too.
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+1 to this.

It'd be nice to see an all inclusive comprehensive CFX 2 card scaling review from 580 SLI down to 5850 CFX and all the cards in the middle in their respective multi-gpu configs. But this was good. I liked the read and the conclusion made sense.

Thanks!
 
AstralTraveller said:
Would have been interesting to see a power consumption comparison, but I suppose they're similar, both idle and load.

One comment: if the biggest bottleneck for GTX460SLI is the framebuffer, then why not buy 2GB cards for 2560x1600 or the multimonitor setups? AFAIK the 2GB versions cost something like 15-20% more, which keeps the SLI config still a lot cheaper than the GTX580.
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Hmm...

The following conjecture applies to specific games and those demanding the highest settings:

* I'm also unaware of the scaling relationship between Pixel-count and Memory requirement, all else equal. I didn't think it was linear, but this seems difficult to predict.

If 1GB can be a limitation at above 1920x1200, then surely the GTX 580's 1.5GB becomes a limitation for any 3x1080p or higher multi-display scenario (~50% more pixels than 2560x1600).

2GB of memory would likely handle 3x1080p, and just barely begin to saturate at 3x 1920x1200 (for those who just want everything maxxed). That covers one scenario in which the 2GB GTX 460 SLi would likely beat the GTX 580 (overclocked vs overclocked). If we step up to the unreleased GTX 560 2GB SLi, and overclock it, then its advantage at high resolutions may just outclass ANY (overclocked or not, 3X, 2X, etc) 1.5GB SLi setup, no?

Would we then need a 3GB GTX 580 SLi setup to absolutely conquer the highest resolutions at the highest settings?...ridiculous, but I'd love to see that running the most demanding games @ 3x30" maxxed out.

This is all irrelevant to me and my single-1080p gaming resolution anyway - I'll be fine with just a single GTX 460 1GB or card of similar class, overclocked :)
 
About a month ago, I came to the same conclusion that the 460 SLI was a great setup.

I sold my 5870XFX for $330 on ebay and bought a pair of 460 768MB cards with mail-in rebates for $299.

I reason was two fold, the 5870 is a great card, but this is the first ATI card I have had in the original Raedon. The fan controller was crazy, so I had to enable manual settings for it wouldn't overheat, ,it couldn't play older games the stronghold, and would blue screen Windows 7 64bit playing COD4 with the ati something.sys

The 460 SLI setup is quieter than one 5870! The fans control themselves properly, and speed up as needed.

And I love the 460SLI setup! not as good as the 1GB setup, but no problems so far at 1920x1200.

So for me it was the speed and getting back to a Nivida card setup.


Nice review!
 
so if the 1 Gb of RAM is the one that holds the 460 back at higher resolution, will the 2 Gb version card will be able to compensate it ?

there are some 2 Gb version of 460, and with 2 460 in sli that's 4gb vram space... like this card for instance :


GeForce® GTX 460 Sonic 2GB (2048MB GDDR5)

Palit GeForce® GTX460 Sonic 2GB provides oversized frame buffer on board and is Overclocking Sonic editon with higher graphics performance. Built from the ground up for DirectX 11, Palit GeForce® GTX460 Sonic 2GB packs highly detailed visuals into your games- without sacrificing high frame rates. And with NVIDIA 3D Vision, PhysX, and CUDA technologies, Palit GeForce® GTX460 Sonic 2GB powers all the incredibly realistic effects that your games can throw its way.

source : Palit Web Site
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RAM in SLI mode is not cumulative, but parallel. So it's still only 2GB.

The reviews with GTX 460 2GB SLI are sparse, but they indicate that it's a waste of time, at least at 2500x1600.

Framebuffer isn't everything. There's also memory bandwidth and other things going on. Wish we could get the ATI and Nvidia engineers to do an interview to explain what feature or component tends to have an impact on what aspect of performance.
 
Matrices said:
RAM in SLI mode is not cumulative, but parallel. So it's still only 2GB.

The reviews with GTX 460 2GB SLI are sparse, but they indicate that it's a waste of time, at least at 2500x1600.

Framebuffer isn't everything. There's also memory bandwidth and other things going on. Wish we could get the ATI and Nvidia engineers to do an interview to explain what feature or component tends to have an impact on what aspect of performance.
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Yes this is correct, I have read that when your vram runs out in surround it then goes to your system ram which is much slower and then your fps tanks out. The 2gtb GTX 460's onlly seem to help in surround resolutions and the very highest iQ settings in 25x16.

http://www.overclock.net/nvidia/801683-surround-gaming-nvidia-gtx460-mainstream-card.html
 
What about 3 way SLI 460's vs. one (1) 580? Any advantage(s) here?

Three (3) 460's is still cheaper than just one (1) 580.


.
 
I have two 460 in SLI and I have the U2711 monitor, some games are fine and some games are not. If it's basically the ram wouldn't it be more prudent to wait for a GTX 580 with 2GB? Since the 460 had only 1GB and the current 580 has 1.5GB?

I was thinking of upgrading to the 580, but I only have 2 pcie slots, and I was thinking of using the 2nd pcie slot for a USB3.0 card. Decisions, decisions....
 
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