Sparkle GTX 465 (SXX4651024D5-NM)
Jul 13th, 2010 | By JaredFirst out of the gate is the suite of 3DMark benchmarks, while a synthetic benchmark they are widely considered the standard for comparing video card and system performance. Synthetic benchmarks don’t necessarily translate to real world performance, but give us a good comparison between cards with a standard scoring system. First I ran 3DMark06 on stock settings and then moved on to 3DMark Vantage. I ran Vantage on the following presets at default settings; Entry, Performance and High.
Stock settings results places the Sparkle GTX 465 about where we would expect them in relation to the HD 5830 and HD 5870 cars. Once overclocked the GTX 465 actually pulls ahead of the HD 5870 iCooler V Turbo.
Next on the block is Furmark. Furmark is an OpenGL benchmark that renders a large ring of fur to stress and test the GPU. Here I ran at a resolution of 1920×1200 with 0 MSAA.
Furmark paints an interesting picture as the GTX 465 needs to be overclocked to pull ahead of the less expensive HIS HD 5830 iCooler V Turbo.
The next benchmark for the synthetic chapter is with Lightsmark 2008, a realtime global illumination and penumbra shadows enabled benchmark. Natural lighting makes artificial graphics life-like. Computers get faster, but rendering more polygons doesn’t add value if lighting looks faked, so insiders know that the next big thing is proper lighting aka Realtime Global Illumination. Typical workloads in realtime rendering will shift. Lightsmark simulates it. Global Illumination renders often take hours. Is your computer fast enough for realtime?
The results here really surprised me as in the past Nvidia cards were typically stronger in this benchmark than the ATI cards though results seem to have flipped here.
Finally we have Unigine’s Heaven benchmark. Taken from Unigine’s website:
Unigine is a cross-platform real-time 3D engine. It stands on the cutting edge of the technology and provides the ultimate power for interactive virtual worlds (modern games and virtual reality systems).
The engine contains photorealistic 3D render, powerful physics module, object-oriented scripting system with a very rich library, full-featured GUI module, sound subsystem, and a set of flexible tools. Efficient and well-architected framework supporting multi-core systems makes Unigine a highly scalable solution, on which multi-platform games of different genres can be based.
The Heaven benchmark was run with 4x AA and 16x AAF, shaders set to high and tessellation set to normal.
Sparkle’s GTX 465 shines in the Heaven benchmark as it beats the HD 5830 card and with the overclock settings it even outpaces the HD 5870 card.
That concludes testing with the synthetic benchmarks, because quite honestly if you are buying this card it is most likely for real games and not necessarily as a benchmarking queen.