[FUD] Upgrade GTX 285 to GTX 460??

We have heard that the second generation Fermi, or the chip that we know as GF104 should have much better overclocking than the GF100. The new chip should come without the L2 cache that might be responsible for weak Fermi overclocking scores, and this should be the chip to save Nvidia's graphics pride.

GF104 will also come with rather attractive pricing, should end up significantly cheaper than Geforce GTX 265 and we would not even be surprised if GF104 based card ends up with GTS prefix.

Launch date should be sometime in late June and the cards should be available at launch. Samples are available to partners and key accounts for a while and the official launch should take place in the next two weeks, of course unless Nvidia decides to push it to July or later.

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I'm wondering if performance will be significantly better than my GTX 285 when overclocked and sold at a good price? I guess we'll find out in a couple of weeks.

Roll on W1zzard's review.

Fudzilla EDIT: Link now broken. Thanks Fudzilla.

EDIT 27AUG10: I've decided to stick with what I've got. Gory details in post 15.

slyfox2151 said:

if u were going to buy a fermi i would go the 470 not 60.

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And if it unlocks to a 470?...

Thanks everybody.

I know that the stock 460 will have performance similar to my 285 or a bit less, but I was wondering if it overclocks very well, it might be significantly faster than my 285 and at a good price to make it worth buying? Having DX11 is also good for playing the odd DX11 game or demo.

I guess we'll just have to wait for W1zzard's review for the hard facts.

Ok, just to round the discussion off people, I've decided not to buy the GTX 460, or upgrade my GTX 285 at all for now. Basically, since I posed the question, I've spent quite a bit on other things, such as a new laptop (HP dv6-1216sa), monitor (iiyama E2607WS) and printer (Brother HL-2150N).

When the "GTX 485" 512 shader monster is released and the price comes down from the statosphere, I'll consider upgrading then. Heck, by that time I might replace the CPU, mobo and RAM as well.

Thanks for your replies and advice everyone.

T3kl0rd said:

That is the least amount of time I would wait to upgrade. I don't like to upgrade my GPU unless it is at least a twofold improvement. I went from HD 4850 to GTX 470 for example. I'll wait until prices come down on the next twice as powerful card or see if SLI technology has improved and eliminated micro stuttering and consider a second GTX 470.

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Your waiting strategy seems sound to me; you really wanna get your money's worth from your current purchases.

On the microstuttering problem, I never saw it (or didn't realise that I had). I had a 9800 GX2 for a while, but I never noticed it. From what I understand from reading a tech article on it once, it only affects animation where the frame rate put out by the card is less than the screen refresh eg 30-45fps on a 60Hz screen. This is supposed to result in uneven stutters I believe. If it's locked to vsync and you get a steady 60fps out of it (ie no dropped frames) then it disappears completely. It certainly looked liquid smooth working like that.

T3kl0rd said:

The reason you don't see micro stutter with the FPS count locked @ 60 is because your system is producing extra frames to compensate for the uneven frame rate being produced by the two cards. The extra frames fill in the gaps when the frame rate drops off in sequential momentary lapses. ATI has some software that changes the way CF is rendered improving micro stutter, hopefully nVidia has something like that too.

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You don't appear to understand how vsync works. The system does not produce any extra frames.

When you lock your framerate to vertical sync, the system produces a video frame and then sits idle until the next screen refresh, when it produces another. When it can do this fast enough, so that it doesn't miss the next vsync, you get liquid smooth video animation. If it misses frames, then you get judder and it looks crap.

What you were thinking of, is when vsync unlocked. The system will then freewheel, producing a continuously varying, uneven framerate, which will be either higher or lower than the monitor refresh rate. Playing a game with it in this state is what leads to line tearing, odd judders and other artifacts.

In short, for gaming, always lock vsync and for benchmarking, always unlock it.

And by "system", I mean the whole lot working together, not just the video card.

@Supremo_Lagarto: thanks for that. It always gets me how next gen tech can do the same thing and more, while improving performance in lots of other areas, like you mentioned.

A good example of this is my HD2900XT, a big-ass underperforming card for it's time that used loads of power and ran very hot. Some small cheapie card can now run rings round it in every respect.