ECS GTX 460 Black Series (NBGTX460-1GPI-F) Video Card Review
Darkest of Days
Contents
Darkest of days is a DirectX 9 game that implements a PhysX engine, moving physics calculations from the CPU to the GPU. Although it’s not very popular, we added this game because of its PhysX benchmarking feature. We ran this game at 1680×1050 with details set at “very high,” and both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled. We ran three tests, first with PhysX set at “low,” where the game makes all physics calculations using the system CPU, then increasing it to “medium” (which adds leaves, wind and weapons impact effects due to bullets and grenades), and finally increasing it to “high” (which adds fog and smoke effects). The medium and high PhysX levels move physics calculations from the CPU to the GPU. Keep in mind that only NVIDIA-based cards support PhysX.
| Darkest of Days – 1680×1050 | Low Phys X | Difference |
| ECS GTX 460 Black Series | 99.25 | |
| GeForce GTX 465 | 99.25 | 0.0% |
| GeForce GTX 460 (768 MB) | 94.43 | -4.9% |
| GeForce GTX 460 (1 GB) | 94.49 | -4.8% |
| Radeon HD 5850 | 59.43 | -40.1% |
| Radeon HD 5830 | 51.69 | -47.9% |
| Darkest of Days – 1680×1050 | Medium PhysX | Difference |
| ECS GTX 460 Black Series | 79.23 | |
| GeForce GTX 465 | 78.09 | -1.4% |
| GeForce GTX 460 (1 GB) | 76.87 | -3.0% |
| GeForce GTX 460 (768 MB) | 69.41 | -12.4% |
| Radeon HD 5850 | 2.96 | -96.3% |
| Radeon HD 5830 | 1.44 | -98.2% |
| Darkest of Days – 1680×1050 | High PhysX | Difference |
| ECS GTX 460 Black Series | 47.62 | |
| GeForce GTX 465 | 46.92 | -1.5% |
| GeForce GTX 460 (1 GB) | 45.83 | -3.7% |
| GeForce GTX 460 (768 MB) | 42.78 | -10.2% |
| Radeon HD 5830 | 1.44 | -97.0% |
| Radeon HD 5850 | 1.36 | -97.2% |