NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 465 is currently the mid-range GPU based on the GF100 architecture. At a price of $290, it will compete with the Radeon 5850 for your hearts and minds – and wallets. The pricing is just low enough to make it cheaper than AMD’s 5850 by a thin margin, but it does not pull a significant advance in terms of performance — on the contrary. Web reports indicated that it loses many key game benchmarks, although not by a lot.
In the end, performance won’t matter as much as power, temperature and noise, a battle easily won by the AMD Radeon HD 5850. If anything, this fight might come down to sheer branding power. The lesson is that first generation-architectures are big, hot and not always super-efficient. The good news is that NVIDIA is probably already working on a “performance kicker” that will be faster, cooler, and cheaper.Obviously, AMD is not playing Pac Man in the meantime…
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