NVIDIA's GTX 400 family of graphics cards are finally entering the sweet spot of its consumers in the form of the GeForce GTX 460 just announced today. Available in 1024MB (US $219, about PhP 10,000) and 768MB ($199, about PhP 9,000) GDDR5 models, the two cards are set to give ATI's value model in its HD 5800 line up serious competition.
The new cards - a little shorter but still as fat as the others taking up two slots on the board - are based on the 40nm GF104 GPU model and can be seen as a cut down model of the GTX 470 and 480. No promised features have been harmed though, just raw numbers. This GPU hosts 336 CUDA cores, 7 polymorph (or tessellator) engines, 2 graphic processing clusters, 7 streaming multiprocessors, and 56 texture units. It also comes with a faster graphics and processor clock at 675MHz and 1350MHz respectively. Memory clock is rated at 3600MHz
Power rating demanded by the two cards stand at 160W for the 1GB model and 150W for the 768MB model. NVIDIA recommends at least a 450W power supply when running these cards, and it needs two 6-pin power connectors, too. NVIDIA has claimed that they've been able to overclock the GTX 460 to a little over 800MHz in GPU graphics clock speed without breaking a sweat using just the stock cooler and withotu having to adjust voltages.
The cards run closely against the GTX 465, which basically has 352 CUDA cores and 11 tessellators and runs at standard clock speeds that the GTX 470 and GTX 480 comes with. Video output interfaces are standard too according to NVIDIA specs: 1x mini HDMI and dual dual-link DVIs. The big difference between the GTX 460 and the rest of the big shots aside from just performance is its support for only 2-way SLI, giving you a reason to still consider a GTX 465 seriously if you're after 3D Vision Surround.
We've got the cards and we'll be running a physical comparison against the GTX 465 and GTX 470 first before heading towards a thorough review and comparison of the card's performance against the tanks of the pack. So stay tuned for those.