HIS vs EVGA Midrange Gaming Face Off Review

Alien vs Predator

The AvP DirectX 11 benchmark takes great advantage of all the major features of the DirectX 11 API. The lighting and shadow, vital in a game such as this, are particularly excellent.

Single GPU – Stock Speeds

Such are the demands of AvP that only the HD6870 breaks past 40FPS with all the others hovering around the 30FPS mark. We can see that the extra RAM on board the 1GB GTX460 does give an improvement of around 4FPS, which at these just-about-playable frame rates can really make a difference.

 

Single GPU – Overclocked

Overclocking the cards definitely favours the nVidias with both GTX460 variants responding well to gain around 5 frames per second. The Radeons only gain a couple which causes the HD6850 to drop behind the 1GB GTX460. The HD6870 remains well out in front.

 

Dual GPU – Stock Speeds

Adding a second GPU finally sees all of the cards on test give us 60FPS gameplay. It’s a demonstration of how far multi-GPU performance has been optimised that the old rule of a 50% improvement no longer holds true. The GTX460s gain 24 and 28FPS whilst the Radeons gain 32FPS for the 6850 and 39FPS for the 6870. Roughly 80% extra performance certainly makes a twin card setup seem awfully tempting.

 

Dual GPU – Overclocked

Finally when overclocked we can see the merits of each card start to level out. The extra memory of the GTX460 1GB still just has the edge over its 768MB brethren but the HD6870 is in a class by itself just under 20 frames per second faster than the other three cards on test.