Hi there! I just bough an XFX 5850 Black Edition for my kid's rig for 40 euros, and now I'm wondering if I should keep it for myself and give him my GTX 460 1Gb. I game at 1920x1080 on a 22" but my kid has only a 17" lcd and plays at 1280x1024. My rig has a C2D E8400@3.9GHz and my kid's running an E8200@3.2GHz. I know that back in the day both cards were pretty close in performance, but with current drivers and games, which is best?
460 probably, nvidia optimized driver for Kepler, and kepler is not that different from Fermi. I do think you will encounter almost same results, unless game is nvidia favor or amd favor.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/512?vs=542 This will give you a rough idea, looking at this they are pretty much neck and neck depending on the game.
5850 was competing with 470, it has some more raw power than 460. Difference is as you can see is not that big. HD 5xxx ware having poor tessellation performance compered to fermi though.
The GTX 460 will support DX12, so chances are the GTX 460 will be viable for modern games for a bit longer.
Update: I have the opportunity of buying another 5850 for 40 euros, a Sapphire. I'm now itching to buy it and crossfire the heck out of them. But my P35 mobo is x16 + x4. And possibly my e8400 @ 4GHz is already bottlenecking one card? What could I expect?
You'll probably see a performance gain, but that dual core probably wont get the most out of both those cards. Those 775 quads are selling dirt cheap, if you could grab a Q6600 even. You'd really see nice gains. I just sold a Q6700 on Ebay for $30. I almost just kept it, hardly worth selling at that price. Lol. My E8400 had no problem pushing my 560ti to +90% usage. That card is right about equal to a 6950.
I decided to stick with my GTX 460 because it has more frequent driver updates, and crossfiring two 5850s on my mobo would yield too little performance gains for each watt spent. Thank you all for the replies!
