The GeForce GTX460 is NVIDIA's latest addition it its Fermi-class graphics processors. The company promises monster geometry processing power, life-like DirectX 11 gaming graphics and stereoscopic technology. A couple of hundred dollars will be enough to secure the NVIDIA GPU, but it might also be worth checking out overclocked third party developments.
Gamers are promised "the ultimate next-generation DX11 gaming experience" for under US$200 and one look at the GeForce GTX460 specifications should tell you why . There's 336 CUDA cores and 56 texture units, PureVideo HD performance and 3D Vision technology. NVIDIA's PhysX effects provide realistic gaming environment in a graphics processing unit with a 675MHz graphics clock and a 1350MHz processor clock.
NVIDIA is claiming up to four times the DirectX 11 tessellation performance compared to ATI's Radeon HD5830 in Microsoft's DX11 SDK Sub D11 Patch 31 test, which holds the promise of incredibly detailed and realistic visuals. There's OpenGL 4.0 support too and a maximum digital resolution of 2560 x 1600 with VGA coming in at 2048 x 1536 over dual slot DVI ports and a mini-HDMI port.
The price depends on the amount of onboard memory, with the unit containing a gigabyte of DDR5 RAM and a 256-bit memory interface costing US$229 and the GTX460 featuring 768MB of DDR5 and a 192-bit interface costing US$199, the latter being available immediately. Watch out for branded versions from ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, Zotac and a host of others though as proprietary tweaking in the overclocking department may well squeeze even more performance from this beast of a budget card.