14 DAY TRIAL // The release date of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 is approaching quickly and already the product has started being listed on online retailers such as Newegg. The specifications themselves are also, for the most part, no longer a mystery. Still, even with all the revelations that the various rumors and leaks enabled, it is yet unclear just how this newcomer will compare to the ATI Radeon HD 5830 that it will have to contend with. Some recently leaked Gigabyte presentation slides appear to have now taken care of this 'oversight'.
The ones that somehow managed to get their hands on the aforementioned slides were the folks over at Expreview. Not all the information on them was new, since the so-called GV-N460D5-768I-B that they speak of will have the same specifications as the reference model which NVIDIA is set to unveil (675MHz GPU clock, 768MB GDDR5 etc.). What the leak does bring new is a variety of test results.
To be more specific, Gigabyte apparently tested the performance of the adapter in benchmarks and games and pitted it against the aforementioned HD 5830, as well as some GeForce 200 cards of the previous generation. In 3DMarck06 and 3DMark Vantage performance presets, the 460 managed to outdo its rival. On the other hand, on the extreme preset of 3DMark Vantage, the AMD card won. The same situation held true during DirectX 11 games as well, where the HD 5830 managed to outperform the upcoming video board in some games.
All in all, the Gigabyte GTX 460 is described as being “close” to the performance of the ATI Radeon HD 5830, which appears to imply that the latter is still slightly faster. What remains to be seen is how much power the product actually consumes and if its feature set justifies its price point of $199.