GTX 460m vs ATI Radeon 5870

I'm a bit confused; Xoticpc is now offering a new model of the Asus G73 with the GTX 460m; essentially they replace the video card and charge 200 more bucks for the same thing. A quick glance at the notebookcheck gfx benchmark list shows that 5870 is superior. Is this just a ripoff or am I missing something?

 

nvidia 285M is more expensive than 5870MR as well, it's just how nvidia price their cards.

 

nVidia GPUs have bigger dies, therefore cost more money. This has no relation with performance though...

 

You also pay for USB3, i7 740qm. And it's only $100 more not $200 according to xotic.

 

The 5870m is more powerful, but according to reports the 460 has some amazing temps for performance.

 

Take into consideration that as NVIDIA's drivers progress, the card's performance will improve. It might end up being a little better in terms of performance in a couple of months.

 

the 5870 is ATI's top card
The 480 is Nvidias top card

Since the begining of time it seems that both brands always have cards that match or nearly match each other (meaning one top card is comparable to the other)

The 460 is not the top card so its not in the same class as the 5870 and even with drivers getting better I do not think it will ever be on par. Considering it cost almost as much though that makes it a sour deal to me.

Temps may be better but the card is doing less work/power so it makes sense to run cooler, plus temps dont really matter as long as they are not so hot that its a problem to the system. That GPU can care less if its 40c or 80c it will run the same.

We have been though this kind of comparison multiple times in the past and the people that bet on "maybe in the future" as is the case here hoping for better drivers always lose out.

If its not doing its job now then your better off not hoping it will.

Now that all said the 460 is a good card, nothing wrong with it at all but just not as good as the 5870.

 

unless they abandon that idea in favor of making the newer 470m look good. after all we wouldn't want the 460m to outperform the 470m right?

 

ALL of NVIDIA's cards will improve, not just the 460M.

Look at when the GTX 480 desktop was released. It was noisy, hot, and didn't perform well for the specs that it packed. It performed around the same as the 5870 desktop. It's been a couple of months now, and look at it - about 20% - 40% better overall, and that was just from the driver versions that NVIDIA released after the release of the GTX 480.

*Note - it still is hot and noisy, but no more than the 5870. Plus, it is definitely worth the price premium you pay for it.

 

Its definitely more hot and noisy than a 5870 I think thats pretty much a universally known fact, and the price premium is not worth it in my opinion not at all for a small boost in only some games and when my 5870 gives me the joy of eyefinity.

Eyefinity would be worth a price premium to me, but of course its actually the cheaper card

Incase you do not know eyefinity is what gives me the joy of playing games in 6004x1200 resolution



And my single 5870 can max out Dirt 2 (pictured) on Ultra settings at that resolution so there would be no reason to even need more power (but I think the 5870 beats the 480 in this game anyways)

 

I don't get it myself, personally think some overexaggerate this and are moronic.
- To these weirdos, this is Nvidia's motto. Buy our products now, and it may work properly 6 months from now! If still not right, it will will work full potential in 12 months. Hang in there!
- ROFLMAO

They don't seem to get drivers don't really improve performance. All it is they create new profiles for games and applications. But when doing so there is a give and take. Faster, less quality. You don't get faster performance just magically out of thin air. The card itself is still the same.

ROFLMAO!

Anyways to OP, if you have waited a year for Nvidia to release a GPU that doesn't suck, it may be good as it's a downclocked GTS 450 Desktop, not the GTX 460 that has been getting a lot of news of late....
- Why don't you wait just a few months more and see what AMD has up their sleeve for HD6xxx
- Of course this waiting game is cyclical, always worrying about what's around the corner.

Good luck with your decision.

 

+1000 LOL

His setup always makes me drool

 

I agree with you mostly. The one thing I kind of dont agree fully is that you said drivers do not improve performance.

Truth is they do, but if you only look at that single fact that in the future the 460 can get better with drivers your fooling yourself into thinking its (possibly or will be/can be) better than the competing card but on the other side of the fence...

The 5870 will also get better with newer drivers, plus if it took 6 months or 12 months for good drivers to come out to get the 460 where it is supposed to be, its that time that a new card is soon to come out and replace it anyways.

 

Tomshardware shares my sentitment about GTX 460/GTS 450.

"Or maybe it’s the fact that last generation’s cards still make for good gaming solutions. Whatever the reason, it’s genuinely difficult to get excited about something we saw from AMD 11 freaking months ago, priced to match."
- I don't understand the excitement over the GTX 460. When AMD came out swinging, we were seeing 30% over the G200. So I expected with this long wait, 30% increase over HD5xxx. Instead we're seeing Nvidia struggling to gain an edge.

So about 11 months after Nvidia comes out with something that doesn't exceed expectations but offer something to match AMD's performance a year ago. And they still can't match price on 11 month old performance.

That said, the 460M seems to be a great mobile card. It should perform, almost as well as HD5870M and seems to run cooler. But this is more likely because the 460M board is literally twice the size of the HD5870M... Truly a monstrous card. But the thing that irks me, it still costs more than the HD5870M.

 

Not to say NVIDIA drivers don't have issues, but I've always found team green's software to be less problematic overall. In one form or another, I've owned pretty much every generation of NVIDIA card since the GeForce2 MX and most ATI products from the Rage II.

That being said, the Mobility 5870 is, by far, the best ATI-based product I've used since the Radeon 9500. It's been a very pleasant surprise. Performance is better than I expected, and its image quality is superior to that of its NVIDIA counterparts.

Despite the fact that the 5870 has been on the market for some time, the drivers still suffer from the same issues I've experienced with ATI's past-generation products. While it used to be "one step forward, two steps back" when it came to new driver releases, today it's more like "one step forward, one step back." The company has been good about correcting issues with some games, but it still has a nasty habit of breaking others at the same time.

Case and point: Many OpenGL games are broken on driver sets later than 10.4. At least you can work around this problem by copying the 10.4 OpenGL driver to the game directory. The fact that you can get the games to work without having to constantly change drivers is more than I can say for past experiences with ATI products, but it's still an annoyance.

That being said, I'm still glad I went with the 5870. The cooling requirements for the GTX 480m make notebooks with that GPU impractical for travel. The added cost was also not worth it.

 

I think thats the biggest issue most people have with the 460m... To little to late, so even if the 460 ends up being equal in the end stock vs stock to the 5870m most people will be left wondering what Nvidia was thinking ?..

Im still anxious to try out the new Nvidia card though and it will be here tomorrow ...

For me it was just about trying something other then another 5870m machine so i know ill be happy regardless...

 

Please show me the door to this fantasy land you live in. I'd like to live there also.

I'm starting to think all this gibberish talk of how awesome Nvidia drivers must because you all purposely choose to ignore the hundreds of posts on every release with Nvidia users upset over dozens of driver issues.
- The latest 260.63 Issues. Bugs still not fixed for many users. BC2 stutters. SLI profiles not complete for some games. No performance boost for GTX 470/GTX 480, only for GTX 460. Can't open the Control Panel... colours now washed out, screwed Realtek drivers forcing reinstall, OpenGL games won't run full screen with Firefox open, constant BSODing, not working with USB monitor, OpenCL/GL benchmarks crash, 3-D preview not working, Windows themes not working, Multi-monitor not working, PhysX set to CPU by default, Microsoft can't copy the drivers/install correctly.

All this from one thread. Yeah Nvidia drivers are rockin awesome.

 

Every card has issues for some people and every driver release has issues for some people ...

Some people are luckier with X hardware then they are with Y hardware ...

Plenty of people complaining from both camps thats for sure..

 

Yep, that's the point I was trying to make. All this BS about Nvidia drivers being better is just that, BS. Problems from both camps.

 

You Radeon guys have to copy graphics card driver files to directories to get your games to work?

BWHAHAHAHA.

Nvidia Drivers are awesome. I have a very long list of games installed right now on my laptop and I don't have to do a single thing but launch the game for them to work perfectly for all the games.

 

Then we have ATI OpenGL game crashes, HDMI overscan not working properly, cursor corruption, fan control problems, Crossfire-related issues too numerous to catalog, and so on. Quid pro quo.

 

I don't think it that Nvidia Drivers are so much superior to ATI but the fact is, if you have a problem with a Nvidia Driver, you have a big choice of alternatives when compared to ATI. As for the new Nvidia 460M / 470M, even the GTX 285M was similar in performance at stock to the 5870 so I don't know why people always make it sound like the 5870 at stock is such a huge boost compared to the Nvidia because it is not (I have owned both). Only when you overclock the 5870 do you see a big difference in performance and the GTX 285M has very little overclock headroom.

Yes, we all know the Nvidia costs more.

 

that gaming setup makes me feel as though i am not worthy to game anymore. i would never leave my computer if i had that O_O. mad props

 

Yeah, that's what I gathered from your almost 2600 Nvidia bashing posts in the last 8 months.....problems from both camps.

 

open gl is suposed to be working in 10.8 unconfirmed and they are suposed to be fixing it ATM

hdmi overscan ???? i have no issue with my lg tv,

cursor corruption has been fixed since 10.6

CFX issue need to get up to date except the alienware m17x-r2 wich has issue related to the dell custom bios
i've seen far less issue from CFX then i've seen from sli and they are far less critical the wort you can see from CFX is a drop of performances while i remember well de dpc issue and other crap from the 280/260 in the m17x-r1 not mentioning the 8800-9800 serie of card that where literaly some time bombs that where set to die around 1 year after purchace

and we don't need to go around my personal experience with nvidia also while ati get one set of driver out for all nvidia tends to drop suport for some card in quite a sneaky way

 

Stuttering with the newest drivers. I don´t think so. Only people who don´t know how to optimize their systems for optimal gaming or other factors like hardware conflicts.

SLI profiles, well then make your own, easy with Nhancer. I have done numerous SLI profiles myself, started with Bad Company 2 for my XPS M1730 even before there existed an official SLI profile for it at all.

There is so much you can look into yourself than just complain about the driver gives you the issues. Not to talk about what updated chipset drivers can do wonders for performance.

 

Well, it's not. 10.9 is imminent, so hopefully it will be fixed. Again, at least you can work around it by using the 10.4 OGL driver, so you're not completely out in the cold.

I am well aware of the problems with the M17x-R1, but were there any similar problems with other brands of notebook with the same GPU? If not, your quarrel is with Dell, not NVIDIA.

Links, please.

The 258.96 drivers released in July 2010 support pretty much every GeForce GPU back to the 6-Series.

 

just look in the alienware legacy forum we get more or less one new failing 8800 per day
dell recaled thier xps lines changing for ati cards

Nvidia warns of high failure rates | bit-tech.net
All nvidia g84 and g86s are bad - The Inquirer

and the list goes on on google


the r1 problems might have been caused by dell just like the r2 are i don't know i never owned one but the 4870 in the m17x-r1 did not caused a dpc latency issue unlike the 260/280



if the new driver does it's a good thing caus around 1 year ago just befor buying my m17 i got stuck on a serie 7 card and i was in a world of hurt finding the right driver for them

 

The Clevo M980NU the only other laptop to utilize dual 260/280's were also rampant with stuttering and DPC latency issues.

The quarrel should be with Nvidia for making a terrible integrated chipset and subpar stuttering cards.

 

I still can't get over the fact that setup is awesome

Totally crap. I play any game with no problem.. talking about NVIDIA , i had a lot of problems.. overheating card , crappy drives which make idle temps even more higher.. BAHH indeed...

lol when did the GTX285M come close to 5870? It was miles away.. only the SLI GTX285M beat the 5870.

totally agree

 

wowzers i envy your setup Vicious!

the thing is shadow, you can only optimize hardware so much before you reach the limits. the gf104 is newer architecture, so i'm assuming it has more headroom to optimize than the older gf100 core (480m) so not all hardware is on the same level of optimization.

oh and on the subject of 5870m being noisy and hot... it runs just as quiet and cool as my original 260m with a little bit of tweaking on the M15x... a laptop in which it was not even intended or supported. The original 260m supplied by dell was also tweaked by their engineers to make it run cooler and with less wattage requirements (65watts as opposed to the advertised 75watts)

 

Wow. The ATI fanboys have come out from under their bridge in force, lol.

^Also, I meant the 5870 desktop in my post. And don't deny it - it is hot and noisy. Maybe not quite as much as the GTX 480, but it is.

I agree with you that the GTX 260M was an extremely hot card for it's performance range. Hell, Asus has to underclock the damn thing in their systems.

 

You are paying as the chipset is more expensive to produce. Any ATI sucks the big one when it comes to driver support. I always shudder when a new AAA game comes out as I KNOW there will be issues, and that it will take months of hotfix and driver releases before it is resolved.. Hell ATI never fixed the HUGE memory leak on the last level of Crysis ( saw it rise to 8GB of used ram lol )

ATI have good hardware innovation, but they don't invest in driver development. This has been like that since the dawn of time. I mean lol the 9700pro was getting pawned for months by a 4200 until they got things fixed.

They really annoy me with things like having to rename exe to get anti aliasing working, or having issues with games not applying it at all or even sometimes no anisotropic filtering. Finally they cannot be bothered to implement the best thing about nVidia drivers and that is game profiles. I hate having extra programs download to do the job the drivers should be.

Oh and for their desktop cards their build quality is horrible. They use cheap and noisy fans, with poor fan control meaning it ramps up and down all the time in 2D. nVidia only had a noisy card this time as they dropped the ball. I guarantee if ATI had a card that big, it would have had far louder and cheaper cooler.

I only went ATI this time as nVidia had no DX11 cards out at the time and I do not game so much...If I had a choice, it would have been nVidia without a doubt.

 

At stock clocks, the ATI 5870 is just over 10% faster than the GTX 285M and in the vast majority of games you will not notice any difference at all. There are a few cases where 5870 will be a lot faster say from 15% and upwards but those cases are few and not consistent enough. Then you have the cases where the 5870 is performing less than the 285M or within 3 - 5 fps of each other.

When it comes to synthetic benchmarks, the ATI 5870 does a lot better but when it comes to the fps in real gaming (what matters), the GTX 285M and the ATI 5870 are extremely close.

I have owned both GPU's but am using the GTX 285M at the moment. I noticed you mentioned overheating with Nvidia but mine idles at 40 - 43C maxing out at 78C.

Take a look at these real gaming benchmarks and you can clearly see the results. There is usually an fps difference between the ATI 5870 vs the GTX 285M at stock clocks in actual game of around 5 fps or so, in some cases you might see an 8 fps performance in favour of the 5870 but sometimes the GTX 285M performs better.

There are many other benchmarks showing exactly the same. However, as I said, the real power of the ATI 5870 comes in its good overclocking potential coupled with its lower price point and DX11. That is the reason why the 5870 has Nvidia losing out.

The GTX 285M is unlikely to be overclocked much more because it is probably near its limit already but the 5870 can be pushed much further. Only when the 5870 has been overclocked do you see significant performance increases when compared to the GTX 285M.

Since the GTX 285M is already very close to the ATI 5870's performance at stock, I would expect the new 460M to either match or beat it but not by much. I expect the 470M to do a better job here.

 

You can't even compare the two. The 480m BARELY beats the 5870m and that's only in SOME games. The 460m doesn't stand a chance..

Most of the 5870m problems that were present were in the G73. That wasn't ATI's fault that was Asus's fault...

Honestly, ati and nvidia both suck.... When your spending so much on a product you shouldn't have to worry about driver failures, PSOD, etc.. There's really no peace of mind with these things, it's either noisy, hot, or just causing graphical problems. It's only when the cards actually work that you can actually make a comparison.

ATI and Nvidia cards both suck, just go with the one that sucks less at the given time and in this situation that would be the 5870m.

 

Stop exaggerating. 280m, 285m, 460m, HD5870m are all basically on the same performance level. In DX11, specially Tessalation, th eHD5870m even looses to the 460m by about 50% performance.

It is only in DX10 and DX9 where the HD5870m seems to get above the rest but not a huge margin as many make it out to be. Additionally, the 460m seems to be a great overclocker too so its a great alternative to HD5870m.

 

No one has overclocked a 460M yet as far as I know, since I haven't seen anyone has one yet... GTX 460 desktop is not a 460M. Although if it is an indication, yeah, I'd agree 460M should be overclockable.
- One thing people keep forgetting, the GF104 that has been released so far has an oversized fan and massive heatsink which won't be in a laptop...
- And while a GTX 460 power consumption is about same as HD5770. GTX 460 overclocked on load consumes a lot more power. We have no idea how well Nvidia did with mobile as AMD did with HD5870M.

And the tesellation, that's a massive exaggeration. Believe remembering Nvidia's own marketing showing 6% over HD5870M. This is a downclocked GTS 450 and even stock HD5870M beats GTS 450 in a number of games from benches of GTS 450 I've seen.

 

Ken- Gentech overclocked the 460m and hit around 8600 on Vantage and the temps looked to be around 68 after the run ?..

On the lost planet 2 demo the 460m beat the 5870 by about 50% overall in DX11...

 

The Lost Planet 2 was stupid. His framerate was not playable. Seemed average of 22 FPS. At that framerate, who cares... To play would be in DX10 and that's where 5870M should be better off anyhow.
- Unless you have a HD5870M CF from Alienware, DX11 gaming on laptop is pretty much out of question if a lot of tessellation is involved.

But the big benefit is that I don't think Asus will fail on Nvidia's vBios like they did with AMD. So in that sense, hopefully more stable, and better buy without headache.

Getting either 460M or HD5870M shouldn't matter much, go with whatever makes you happy, or go with your wallet, whichever gives you bigger bang for the dollar, HD5870M IMO in that case.

IMO the real wait should be when 28nm architecture comes around (2 years at minimum from now). Hopefully then we'll see some significant boost in laptop gaming performance from either Nvidia or AMD. And when DirectCompute/GPGPU and OpenCL based Physics, that's when PC Gaming will take off, not this tesellation.

 

Keep in mind that was on High DX11. On Low the performance actually becomes playable.

I agree that at this point, DX11 is practically a moot point on laptops because no GPU except maybe the 480m might reach something near playable framerate. But that does not stop the superiority of the 460m in DX11 just as HD5870 has superior DX10 and DX9 performance. It exists so lets not downplay it.

Additionally, the 460m seems to be able to overclock quite a lot, matching my regular OC HD5870m vantage (8600) so in the end, the 460m is a decent card and the only viable competitor (in price/performance) to HD5870m.

I'd say that both are good for your money. They will forever battle and outperform each other in different games.

 

nVidia > AMD. I've owned Crossfire 4870 and 5870m now and say this without any reservation. Anyone saying otherwise is just insecure about their purchase and trying to defend it. Kinda like those console fangirls with Sony vs MS. It's funny how people's memory on this forum is so short, you must have goldfish brains:

1. GSOD GSOD and some more GSOD on the side please.

2. Crossfire rolling lines/driver incompatibility issues.

3. Powerplay problems with a lot of vendors (sans Dell).

4. Overscan problems

5. BFBC2 still doesn't work right with any ATi driver besides 10.5

6. ATi 4870 Crossfire's 2nd GPU was not working (desktop + mobile) until Cat 10.8b and it took a LOT of pleas from customers for AMD to do something.

7. AMD Crossfire does not scale nearly as well as SLi (~20% deficit).

8. AMD has weak DX 11 performance.

The list goes on and on and on and on. I would trade in my 5870s for a pair of 470m's + pay cash to get rid of them.

P.S. AMD mobile drivers blow.

 

Hahaha, I had no idea that by asking this (relatively) simple question regarding the pricing of two configurations of the G73 I was lighting a proverbial fire under a stack of explosives. But to return to the point, the 5870 seems to perform a bit better in dx9/dx10 games (most games nowadays); the 460 seems to perform better when dx11 is enabled (e.g. tesselation and other stuff I'm not aware of ) and in the end it really doesnt matter which model you get since its only a few fps difference?

 

The correct post would be Nvidia SLI > CF Radeon. Because thats the basic bulk of your complaints.

What issue with BFBC2 are you talking about? CF related? I play it and I haven't had any issues, the game runs great for me.

what was the overscan issue too? I plug it into my TV and I don't have problems with overscan...

As for DX11 performance, it is true, specially in the mobile area, but technically it is also true for nvidia right now. They both have rather weak DX11 cards. Hell, I think only the 480m is able to put nearly playable fps.

I have had my fair share of issues with single GPUs from nvidia, from downclocking to crashes etc. There are also SLI issues with latency and stuttering but I think this applies to any multi GPU config?

Both vendors have their share of problems, but the one true thing is that SLI scales much better, specially with fermi.

 

This is correct... You will still have your Fan(boys) who will hate in one direction or the other but in the end they are fairly evenly matched ...

As i usually say its just a matter of picking your poison ... If you dont have a preference IE ATI or Nvidia then theres always eeny meeny miny mo ...

 

off topic but how the hell are you making use of 5tb of space? I'm having troubling conceiving of filling up more than a tb tbh

 

Have you owned a 260/280 SLI machine? Neither company has put a stable dual card solution on the table in years.

 

Trust me its not hard lol... Tons of games and stuff over the years ... There like huge garbage bags you dont throw away...

You just keep buying more and filling them up ..

I have more then that if i counted externals lol..

 

I find it hard to believe how much you are defending ATI here. I have no beef with you Ziddy, but this is getting ridiculous. Just because the 460M wins in one benchmark you suddenly have to go and call it stupid and claim that nobody cares about it? Remember - this is an indication of how well the 460M will slap the 5870 silly in DX11. As it becomes better optimized, we'll get better frame rates anyway.

 

That may all change with the X7200

Or lets say i hope it does for how much cash they are paying ..

 

Yeah...it seems we kind of set the thread on fire here. Some people are just extremely good trolls.

About that...it seems to have been around for months but why hasn't it been released yet?