HEXUS.bang4buck
HEXUS.bang4buck
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang per buck, we've aggregated the 1,280x1,024 (1,280x720 for LP) frame rates for the three games, normalised them* and taken account of listed the cards' prices.
But there are more provisos than we'd care to shake a stick at. We could have chosen three different games, the cards' prices could have been derived from other sources and pricing tends to fluctuate daily.
Consequently, the table and graph below highlight a metric that should
only be used as a yardstick for evaluating comparative performance with
price factored in. Other architectural benefits are not covered,
obviously.
| Graphics cards | Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 512MiB OC | HIS Radeon HD 3650 IceQ Turbo 512MiB | HIS HD 2600 XT IceQ 256MiB | Foxconn GeForce 8600 GT OC 256MiB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1280x1024 | 91.61 | 90.8 | 92.13 | 93.52 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1280x1024 | 47.42 | 46.2 | 48.2 | 50.28 |
| Current price | £52 | £57 | £68 | £60 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1280x1024 | 0.912 | 0.811 | 0.709 | 0.838 |
| Acceptable frame rate (av. 60fps) at 1680x1050 | No (CoH, QW, LP) | No (CoH, QW, LP) | No (CoH, QW, LP) | No (CoH, QW, LP) |
* The normalisation refers to taking playable frame rate into account. Should a card benchmark at over 60 frames per second in any one game, the extra fps count as half. Similarly, should a card benchmark lower, say at 40fps, we deduct half the difference from its average frame rate and the desired 60fps, giving it a bang4buck score of 30 marks. The minimum allowable frame rate is 20fps but that scores zero.
As an example, should a card score 120fps we treat it as 90fps as only half the frame rate above 60fps is counted for the bang4buck - this is the formula: (120-((120-60)/2)). Similarly, should it score 30fps, we count it as only 15fps: (30+((30-60)/2)).
The reasoning behind such calculation lies with playable frame rates.
Should card A score 110fps in a benchmark and card B 160, then card B would otherwise receive an extra 50 marks in our bang4buck assessment, even though both cards produce perfectly playable frame rates and anything above 60fps is a bonus and not a necessity for most.
Similarly, without our adjustments, the aggregated bang4buck total for two very different cards would be identical if, in a further benchmark, card A scored a smooth 70fps and card B an unplayable 20fps. Both would win marks totally 180, yet the games-playing experience would be vastly different.
A more realistic (and useful) assessment would say that card A is better because it ran smoothly in both games - and that view would be accurately reflected in our adjusted aggregation, where card A would receive 150 marks (85+65) and card B 100 (100+0).
In effect, we're including a desired average frame rate, in this case 60, and penalising lower performance while giving frame rates higher than 60fps only half as much credit as those up to 60fps. If this doesn't make sense or you have issue with it, please hit the HEXUS community.
Here's the HEXUS.bang4buck graph at 1,280x1,024.
The graph divides the normalised score by the price.
All four cards score roughly the same, both in terms of aggregate and normalised performance.
The Sapphire is the cheapest of the bunch and therefore has the best HEXUS.bang4buck metric.
