Anecdotal Evidence: A GT430 is as fast as a GTX480

[SunnyD]

Before you all jump on my case, no, it's not. I'm not that stupid. However, I found something interesting out last night, and I figured I'd share my anecdotal evidence with you.

I haven't been playing games much on my PC lately. Life has made different priorities for me. So I figured I'd pocket some money by downgrading. Over on FS/FT, I found a Radeon 5830 for a stellar price, which is sufficiently fast for my needs. I set about selling my GTX480 to fund this little purchase, and within about 45 minutes of posting it @ $240 I had a buyer on another forum. Purchase made on the 5830, I now had a void in my desktop to fill for a few days while the 5830 is enroute.

So last night I wandered downstairs and cracked open the kidputer - a low profile box I built so the kids could learn (homeschool) and play a little bit on. Originally the box was built with an Intel i3-530, but given my kids are getting into slightly more complicated games, I upgraded it to a GT430 not too long ago. Scavenging that card was my plan.

Popped out the card, took off the LP bracket, and swapped it into my desktop (i7-870S + 12GB ram + SSD). Then for shits and giggles I decided to fire up a few of the games I have been playing recently. Without changing settings, still running at 1080p, the few titles I tried felt... no different than with the GTX480. Granted one of them was an older title - City of Heroes, and one newer title; Star Trek Online - both of which had a habit of making the fan on the GTX480 take off.

I'm sure there was a drop in frame rates, but I didn't feel it one bit. Tonight I may try a few other, probably more demanding titles like Fallout 3 and Oblivion to see what hell breaks loose.

So there you go. Anecdotal evidence... a GT430 is as fast as a GTX480.

 

[Arkadrel]

....OR your buying un-nessary hardware, much more powerfull than your actual needs.

^-^

 

[smackababy]

....OR your buying un-nessary hardware, much more powerfull than your actual needs.

^-^

That is not possible, sorry. No powerful cards are unnecessary (what I believe you meant).

 

[Denithor]

What screen resolution?

 

[SunnyD]

What screen resolution?

Really? tl;dr?

Without changing settings, still running at 1080p,

 

[Motorheader]

SunnyD that is great to hear - and not surprising. I'm happy with my 3 year old card. My PC is a tool to get things done and doesn't run benchmarks all day. It is stable and does what I ask of it.

 

[Pantalaimon]

What screen resolution?

Without changing settings, still running at 1080p

He said it there.

 

[KIAman]

So you kept the settings you had for GTX480. I am assuming you cranked up the AA quality. Your GT430 ran "perceptibly" the same as the GTX480 with quality settings or you never ran quality settings on your GTX480 (which would be sacrilege on 1080p for a GTX480)?

 

[SunnyD]

So you kept the settings you had for GTX480. I am assuming you cranked up the AA quality. Your GT430 ran "perceptibly" the same as the GTX480 with quality settings or you never ran quality settings on your GTX480 (which would be sacrilege on 1080p for a GTX480)?

I always up the quality settings on titles I play. I hardly ever use AA though, as at 1080p there's no reasonable reason to enjoy the "blur". (I personally think most AA modes look awful)

I should probably also point out that the GT430 I have is a 128 bit 1GB DDR3 model.

 

[Zap]

BITD... I was playing WoW and WolfET (sometimes at the same time, set WoW character to follow wife's character, ALT-TAB and set some mines in WolfET). I had a Radeon X800 series card, but sold it preparing to upgrade (don't even remember what). As a temporary measure I popped in a GeForce 6200. Next time I gamed, I had forgotten that I'd done the downgrade. After a while, I was like "why does it feel a little bit choppy?" Obviously it was slower, but the difference wasn't great enough to see a huge difference immediately.

Of course that was WoW prior to any expansions and WolfET. Both didn't require much hardware.

 

[StrangerGuy]

I can already easily tell a difference between a GT420M @ 1366x768 vs 5850 @ 1080p in L4D2. And that isn't a very GPU intensive game by todays standards.

 

[SirPauly]

Indeed, a very small sampling!

 

[OVerLoRDI]

Over on FS/FT, I found a Radeon 5830 for a stellar price

 

[TemjinGold]

OP: What probably happened was that you went into it thinking the GT430 was going to suck hardcore. Since your expectations were low, the card surpassed them, which is why you didn't perceive a difference.

 

[Idontcare]

So you noticed no perceivable difference between a vcard rendering 140 fps and a vcard rendering 70 fps on your 60Hz LCD?

GTX480 is kinda considered to be overkill for 1080P, isn't it?

 

[OCGuy]

So you noticed no perceivable difference between a vcard rendering 140 fps and a vcard rendering 70 fps on your 60Hz LCD?

GTX480 is kinda considered to be overkill for 1080P, isn't it?

Depends on the game and what kind of settings you use.

ARMA2, BFBC2 and now BF3 can be very resource hungry.


On that note, I am all for people looking at benchmarks of games they actually play before purchasing hardware.

I see the same kind of waste in people with 8-12GB of RAM, and 1k PSUs running a single card or two cards not named Fermi. More != better.

You have to remember with GPUs it isnt always about average FPS. Minimum is a big deal if a 20 frame drop is 1/3rd of your average frame rate.

 

[SunnyD]

Fallout 3 plays fine on "High" settings.

As does Oblivion.

Now to try BFBC2...

 

[toyota]

lol, wtf? it depends on the game and settings of course. my 8600gt is not much slower than gt430 and craps itself with any decent settings in newer games at just 1280. gee I guess a Smart Car is just as fast as a Mustang GT in bumper to bumper traffic though...

 

[Yuriman]

I'm still rocking a Q6600 system I put together in 2007, with the exception of a 4870 I threw in a year later. I've yet to install a game I can't comfortably run on high settings. I fully expect to be able to crank up Diablo 3 to highest (or not visibly different from highest) settings when it comes out next year, too.

It's a sad state of affairs when I can't justify upgrading hardware because the industry isn't going anywhere.

 

[toyota]

I'm still rocking a Q6600 system I put together in 2007, with the exception of a 4870 I threw in a year later. I've yet to install a game I can't comfortably run on high settings. I fully expect to be able to crank up Diablo 3 to highest (or not visibly different from highest) settings when it comes out next year, too.

It's a sad state of affairs when I can't justify upgrading hardware because the industry isn't going anywhere.

what res are you at? there are plenty of games you cant run on high settings if by high you actually mean highest.

 

[RussianSensation]

I just fired up Starcraft 1 on my laptop with 4500 Intel integrated and noticed no difference in performance between it and my 6950. Discrete GPUs are a huge waste of $. Intel integrated FTW!

Moral of the story, if you are playing older games like HL2, company of heroes, then of course you don't particularly need a GTX480. Even an 7900GTX will max those out. This is why I often dismiss tests of modern hardware in games like Quake 4 or Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare since any modern card can play them comfortably.

 

[The Ultimate]

When I sold my Crossfire setup, I used a 9600GT to run COD MW2 while I was waiting to receive my HD 6970, it wasn't as smooth as my Crossfire setup which maxed the game and ran it with 24 CFAA while I was limited to 4x FSAA only to make it playable, but it was enjoyable nevertheless. I think that we reached a point that hardware is so fast that software can't keep it up. I think that in most scenarios (Not all), high end hardware will simply add you more eye candy like AA and higher resolutions, but that's it, won't really change much the gaming experience overall unless if we jump on the Eyefinity/Surround bandwagon, or go 3D or some sort of PhysX/Bullet API which seems not to take off.