NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 240: The Card That Doesn't Matter
by Ryan Smith on January 6, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Battleforge
BattleForge is EA’s card-based online-only RTS. As the first DirectX11 title it’s of particular importance for the latest rendition of DirectX, although in this case we aren’t using any features that would be impacted by it. Even without ambient occlusion, BattleForge manages to be a rather punishing game for GPUs.
The extra shading power of the GT 240 finally gets to show itself, as it ends up within spitting distance of the 8800 GT and slightly above the 9600 GT. The DDR3 version of the card still trails the GDDR5 version by 10-15% however.
We haven’t talked about the EVGA GT 240 Superclocked yet, so we’ll take a moment here to talk about it. Without a GPU overclock, it only barely manages to separate itself from the pack. A fraction of a frame per second here and there makes it faster than the GT 240 in our charts, but not appreciably so. The GT 240 doesn’t appear to be bandwidth starved when coupled with GDDR5.
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MadMan007 - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
Yup, iyo (in your opinion.) However it's clear from browsing just about any hardware forum for sale section that the used video card market is quite healthy. So if iyo it's a non-starter then you would be free to ignore such comparisons, but it's impossible for others to add such comparisons except by using indirect comparisons.Spoelie - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
"That leaves the 4670, which the GT 240 beats."Except that you compared the GT240 to a 512MB 4670. You can get a 1GB 4670 for $75/$65 before/after rebate, or $70 without rebate.
The extra 512MB would bump up its performance and it still is a lot cheaper than a GT 240.
I can still find several 4770/4850 in stock, for now.
mczak - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
The GT240 DDR3 doesn't beat the HD 4670 512MB if I look at these benchmarks, seems to be about a draw. The HD 4670 is significantly cheaper however. The 1GB HD 4670 are not going to be faster, in fact they are (at settings which are playable at least hence usually not limited by the amount of ram) slightly slower because they use a bit slower ddr3 memory instead of gddr3.The gddr5 version of the GT240 is faster than the HD 4670, I think it will be interesting to see how it'll fare against the HD 5670 (redwood based). If those early leaks are any indication, performance could be close, but I'd suspect the 5670 will draw less power, have more features (DX11, EyeFinity), and not be more expensive.
samspqr - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
I wouldn't say the 240 beats the 4670: it is faster at high quality settings, where fps are unplayable with both cards; at quality settings that mean playable fps, they are kind of even, aren't they?Ryan Smith - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
And just to reply to myself, the 5750 is still suffering from AMD's price inflation. At its MSRP it's worth a look, but at current prices it's in a different price bracket altogether.Zebo - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
How can AMD price 5750 near it's MSRP when two smoke a 5850 and would be cheaper?Zebo - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
MSRP of $109 and beats anything below $150, Thus it's repriced at ~140vol7ron - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
Could you maybe explain why the 9800GT was not covered in the tests, but was talked about a lot on the intro. page?To me that makes no sense. "We'll tell you how the card compares physically, but we won't show you how it compares in practice."
Spacecomber - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
I wondered the same thing. I believe that the 8800GT has the same specifications as the 9800GT; so, it will give you a pretty good idea of how the GT240 stacks up to the 9800GT.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
Correct. We list an 8800 GT in our tests because that's the specific card we used, but 8800 GT == 9800 GT in specs and performance.