Geforce GTS 360M vs Radeon 5730

Hey guys,

I've been having a hard time comparing these two new graphic cards, Geforce GTS 360m and Mobility Radeon 5730. There are no reliable benchmarks that I could find for either one of them. So I'd like to hear your input!

Note that I'm talking about GTS 360m here, not GTX 360m. GTS 360M seems to be a rebranded GT 240M with higher core and memory speed (GDDR5) and twice as much pipelines and thus remarkably higher performance (174 vs 413 gigaflops, source: notebookcheck).

notebookcheck lists GTS 360m many ranks higher than radeon 5730 even though they don't have benchmarks for them whereas videocardbenchmark gives radeon 5730 a bit better score and ranking (see the links below). Additionally, notebookcheck lists radeon 5730 in performance class 2 and GTS 360m in class 1.

Notebookcheck GPU list

Videocarcbenchmark list

Depending on your input, I'm getting either Asus N61JA (N61JA-JX005V) for 925 € or Asus G60JX (G60JX-JX046V) for 1253 €. Both are equipped with the same cpu intel core i5-430m and similar specs overall apart from the graphics card. N61JA has USB 3.0 whereas G60JX comes with a gaming mouse and a backbag.

I'm hoping to be able to play the upcoming Battlefield: Bad company 2 on high details with possibly a high resolution (external Full-HD display).

Thanks for your help in advance!

 

I cant help with the gfx card comparison but I can help with BF BC2!

The game isnt very GPU demanding but very very CPU demanding. It will run like carp on Dual Cores but runs great with a Quad.
I havent had an i5 mobile to test it yet so you might want to make sure it will give accesptable performance with that. I am hoping the hyper threading will give it the multicore grunt it needs.

To give you an example I have a desktop with Quad and 8800gt and get 60-80fps at 1920-1080 high settings on 32 player servers
My Clevo M860TU with dual core and GTX260m (clocked to the same speed as 8800GT) gets 12-30fps.

I have ordered a Q9000 2ghz quad and will let you know the difference

 

Hmm that's very interesting, cause here I thought no games as of yet could make use of the quad cores. Your laptop seems to have a very good dual core cpu however, so as you stated, the game must really require a quad core cpu to be playable

 

I think a patch could fix supoprt for Quad-Core support, but i'm not sure if all current games support Dual-Core.

 

If the GTS 360M uses GDDR5 (Class 1, equivalent to 256-bit GDDR3) and the HD 5730 uses GDDR3 (Class 2, I don't think it comes with GDDR5), then the GTS 360M will be the winner by far. If the GTS 360M is crippled w/ GDDR3, they should be around the same level.

 

If I would purchase a laptop with a 5730 right now...do you think it would last me 2 years gaming wise?

 

You can not compare a DX10 card to a DX11 card. DX11 is a pretty big deal unlike DX9.0c to DX10. DX11 brings many new things to the table, tessellation, and directcompute 11 for starters.

 

GTS 360M is rebranded GTS 260M (obviously it couldn't be rebranded GT 240M as it have twice the CUDA cores)
So it's slightly faster than GTS260M. As for HD 5730 it seems to be a bit faster than GTS 250M (based on HD5650 vs. GTS 250M)
So it looks like GTS 360M is going to be faster than HD 5730 (no drastic difference though, I suspect)
GTS 360M is 413 gigaflops while HD 5730 would be faster than GTS 250M which is 360 gigaflops.
Sorry but as you mentioned there are no conclusive benchmarks at this time so it's the best educated guess I can come up with.
Also GDDR5 would work in favor of GTS360M if it gets it.

 

To be honest, I find that very strange, since very few FPSes require a quad core. Apparently BF: BC 2 is one of the few.

Supreme Commander from 2007 was designed to work with quad core from the ground up.

 

You reckon I should rather go for the DX11 compatible radeon 5730 than the faster GDDR5 GTS 360M? This is also one of the issues I've had while evaluating the two graphics cards.

 

dx11 games will come out, but as long as nvidia doesnt support dx11 (or consoles for that matter), games will have option to run under dx10.
360gts is better then 5730 as in all benchmarks ran so far, 5730 is just slightly better then 250gts. even if 360gts had only ddr3, it would still be a better card.

if i were you, i'd go for 360gts. also, keep in mind that nvidia also has much better driver support then ati does.

 

According to NVIDIA's homepage, Geforce GTS 360M performance is 413 gigaflops. AMD's homepage tells me Mobility Radeon 5730 has a processing power of 520 gigaflops. Does that mean 5730 is faster? Even though 360M has monstrous memory speed (2000 MHz) for a mobile GPU...

 

The 360m GTS, IMO. The 5730 isn't beefy enough to be taking advantage of its DX11 capabilities anyway. The 360m will adequately perform in most games under Dx10 mode.

 

Unfortunately those values are meaningless in games. The 360M doesn't have fast memory speed, it's just that with GDDR5, the rate is times 4 instead of 2 (so quoted values will be twice as high as compared to a double bandwidth GDDR3 card, ie. 128-bit 2000MHz GDDR5 will be about 256-bit 1000MHz GDDR3).

 

Honestly, I'd recommend the 5730 just because the Radeon will use a lot less power in a notebook. But I actually use my machine on battery sometimes

 

Some claims have been made in this thread based on what someone thinks/feels or whatever. I tried to give as many facts as I could think of in my post but it seems I forgot about sth important.
German version of notebookcheck benchmarked Mobility Radeon HD5650 against some current cards and these results can be important.
5730 is in fact 5650 with slight overclock (50MHz in this case- in comparison with Compal NBLB2)
5730 can be expected to be slightly faster unless game is heavily CPU dependent, in which case you have to count that in (Compal= Core i7)

Now GTS 360 is in essence GTS 260 with overclock (96 CUDA cores) but it's gonna be slower than GTX260 (112 CUDA cores). Now the benchmarks.
GTS250 is also 96 CUDA cores but with lower freqs than GTS260.

GTA IV (1024x768, medium settings)
5650= 42fps
GTX260=48fps

FEAR 2 (1280x1024, high)
5650= 58fps
GTX260=64fps
GTS250-44fps (51fps for GDDR5 version)

World in Conflict (1024x768 high)
5650= 44fps
GTX260=42fps

Need for speed - Shift (1024x768 medium)
5650= 44fps
GTS250=39fps

Risen (1024x768 medium)
HD5650=37fps
GTX260=41fps
GTS250=31fps

Based on these benchmarks one can claim that GTS360 may be faster than HD5730 but just slightly as even GTX260 is not much faster.

For those claiming HD5730 is not fast enough for DX11 there is STALKER Call of Pripyat benchmark where HD5650 scores exactly the same in DX10 and DX11 mode- both playable at 720p

Sources:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-Mobility-Radeon-HD-5650-Graphics-Card-Review.24035.0.html
http://www.notebookcheck.pl/Recenzja-Compal-NBLB2.23723.0.html

 

Both cards should be on a 40nm fabrication and fairly efficient at idle.

 

This is rather obvious, but the 360M wins, by far.

Why? With GDDR5, the 360M has effectively twice the memory bandwith of the 5730. And if you want to talk shaders, the 5730 has 400, equivalent to 80 of Nvidia's cores; the 360M has 96.

Please, please, don't even try to argue the benefit of DX11 in a low-end GPU. You should see the comparisons of DX10 and DX11 for S.T.A.L.K.E.R before you comment on that. I like the series, and Pripyat is bug-free, but their engine hasn't changed one bit.

Tesselation is the key feature of DX11. I'm not arguing against DX11, its future is undoubtedly bright. But you'll want every ounce of performance you can get (from a notebook) if you plan on enjoying these games with every DX11 feature turned on; at very least the 5870M (essentially a desktop 5750/5770). In a sense, the 5750/5770 is the ideal replacement for the 8800 GT as a performance constant with DX11 development.

 

My desktop 5870 quite often hits 98-100% GPU load, I wouldnt say it isnt GPU demanding :/

but you did remind me I have HT turned off in bios, gonna turn that back on see if that helps perfs.

 

GTX360 had twice the bandwidth and where does it lead?
I didn’t invent these benchmarks mentioned above.
GTS360M can't be faster than GTX260 as the latter has 112 CUDA cores and 256bit GDDR3 memory. And I've given you benchmarks in my previous post.

As for STALKER DX10 vs DX11 comparison I've seen it and there is a link to the source in my last post. I don't even know what do you mean by "I should see"?
This game has been released in Poland in November 2009 so Compal (aka DevilTech) has been tested with this game in both DX10 and DX11.

Based on benchmarks I provided 5730 is somewhere in between GTS250 and GTX260 and so is GTS360.

 

Visually, there is not one distinct difference between DX10 and DX11. At least with Clear Sky, they made an effort to add DX10 and DX10.1 effects.

The 5730 is a GDDR3, 128-bit GPU. GTS 360M has GDDR5. What are you defending here? Your benchmarks were all run at 1024x768, which renders them meaningless. 5730 performance will dive above 720p, GTS 360M is good for 1080p in some cases.

Hence why option one is paired with a WXGA LCD and costs hundreds less... you get what you pay for!

And do I need to mention that at low resolutions, the CPU has a much more profound effect on framerates? This is why it is important, when comparing GPUs, to compare them in 100% GPU strenuous tests.

 

I agree 5730's performance will do gown in high resolutions. This is a mid-range card and nothing more can be expected.
GTS360 however is just a GTS250 with 15% more juice (comparing gigaflops).
GTS250 performance is well documented and not that good (slower than 5650 in most games) There is also GTS250 with GDDR5 and it doesn't help that much.

I'm not defending anything as I have no personal interest it either outcome or in convincing you for that matter.
Furthermore I do agree that GTS360 will be faster than HD5750 but not by far and I provided as much facts to back it up as i could.

BTW I can see the difference, can you?
http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/5...-DirectX-10-DirectX-11-Comparison-Screenshots

 

The difference is probably negligible.

It's nice playing the memory bandwidth game... but 2 points:

1) Memory bandwidth is pointless if the card doesn't take advantage of the bandwidth in the first place

and

2) The architectures are different. ATI is well known to be more efficient with memory bandwidth and higher AA/resolution that Nvidia cards - see the G92 and GT200 cards vs. the RV770 or RV870... the comparison isn't even close. ATI is much more efficient for the card's RAM and memory bandwidth

From all the benchmarks, the GTS360M might be a bit faster than the 5730 - but the difference is probably negligible (certainly within the margin of error if there are CPU differences) and the 5730 has the advantage of being DX11, which will provide more benefits than just gaming (DXCompute)

 

@downloads and @chewietobbacca,

Thanks for pointing out some very important *facts* so this thread actually will have some useful purpose. I have many nvidia cards and love them, but these latest ATI cards are damn good, too.

IMHO, the 5730 is very well matched for 1366x768 which is a very common rez in mid-range laptops. It also runs relatively cool, so less fan noise. The performance seems very good and the real life differences between the cards being discussed are probably not significant. Many people actually playing games (vs running benchmarks) are reporting good results with the 5730 cards.

The good news is that all of these cards probably run 95% of all games well.

 

That is correct. When coupled with the 'low definition' screen, the results are frankly very good. You can check my performance thread I made a few months back.

 

Thanks, will do!

 

None of which the 5730 can use because its too slow

 

Do you have any facts to back up your opinion? So far, all I've seen is conjecture that this "must be" the case, but the only benchmark I've seen the 5730 ran the game (Stalker) faster under DX11 than DX10. I know features like tessellation might add load, but that does not mean the card will not be able to support it. Won't know that for sure until we try it. It may surprise you.

 

Unless its magically faster than the desktop 5670 GDDR5 which I have owned and used then I know exactly how fast it is.

 

Hmmm...not exactly a fact, but I'll let that go.

The question was can it run a game reasonably well with DX-11 features enabled. I'm just saying that we won't know until we have some actual games to test and that in the only case I've seen so far it did fine. The benchmarks for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat showed the 5730 ran the game faster w/DX11 than w/DX10 indicating at least some performance benefit (though the difference was small).

And, of course, it ran the game w/DX11 fine which seems to contradict your claim. I'm no gfx expert, just a guy who likes playing games, so I just wondered if you had any real facts on this as I was curious. Now I see that it is just your educated guess and that's fine, I'm sure you know more about it than I do. But I'll still reserve judgment, at this point, as I still don't think we'll really know until we have more games in hand.