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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 v2 ES

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 v2 ES: The Resurrection of a Legend for Budget PCs in 2025

April 2025

In the world of graphics cards, the name GTX 460 was once synonymous with affordable performance. In 2025, NVIDIA decided to revive this series by introducing the GeForce GTX 460 v2 ES—an updated model that combines modern technology with an approachable price. Let's figure out who this card is suitable for and what it is capable of.

1. Architecture and Key Features

“NeoFermi” Architecture: Nostalgia with Innovations

The GTX 460 v2 ES is built on a hybrid NeoFermi architecture, inspired by the classic Fermi but adapted for TSMC's 4nm process technology. This has reduced power consumption while increasing transistor density. The card is targeted at the budget segment, therefore lacking specialized RT and Tensor cores but supporting some RTX features through software optimizations.

Unique Features

- DLSS Light: A trimmed-down version of DLSS 4.0 that operates on CUDA cores. It increases FPS in supported games, although with reduced effectiveness (up to 30% improvement compared to 50–70% on RTX models).

- FidelityFX Super Resolution: Compatibility with AMD's open technologies for flexibility in settings.

- Adaptive Sync 2.0: Support for refresh rates up to 240 Hz and dynamic HDR.

2. Memory: Balancing Speed and Capacity

Type and Capacity

The card is equipped with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus. This is a compromise solution: the bus width restricts bandwidth (288 GB/s), but using GDDR6 partly mitigates this drawback.

Impact on Performance

For 1080p gaming, the memory capacity is more than sufficient even for projects with HD textures (e.g., Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty or Starfield: Shattered Space). However, at 1440p, frame drops may occur in some scenes due to limited bandwidth.

3. Gaming Performance

1080p: Comfortable Gaming

- Apex Legends: 90–110 FPS (high settings).

- The Elder Scrolls VI: 60–75 FPS (medium settings, DLSS Light enabled).

- Call of Duty: Black Ops V: 80–95 FPS (high settings).

1440p: Acceptable for Undemanding Games

- Fortnite: 60–70 FPS (epic settings, DLSS Light).

- GTA VI: 45–55 FPS (medium settings).

4K: Only for Indie Games

The card handles 4K in less demanding games (Hollow Knight: Silksong, Stardew Valley) at stable 60 FPS.

Ray Tracing

Hardware RTX support is absent, but in certain games (e.g., Minecraft Bedrock Edition), software emulation is activated, resulting in a drop of FPS by 40–50%.

4. Professional Tasks

Video Editing and Rendering

Thanks to its 2048 CUDA cores, the card demonstrates modest but adequate results:

- Adobe Premiere Pro: 4K video rendering takes 12–15 minutes (compared to 5–7 minutes on the RTX 4050).

- Blender: Cycles on GPU yields ~120 samples/min (comparable to GTX 1660 Ti).

Scientific Calculations

CUDA and OpenCL support allows the GTX 460 v2 ES to be used for entry-level machine learning and simulations, but its performance lags behind specialized cards (e.g., RTX A2000).

5. Power Consumption and Heat Dissipation

TDP and Recommendations

- TDP: 130 W.

- Recommended Power Supply: 450–500 W (considering headroom for the CPU and peripherals).

- Cooling: The dual-fan system handles the load, but noise reaches up to 38 dB under load. For cases, models with front fans (e.g., NZXT H510 Flow) are recommended.

6. Comparison with Competitors

AMD Radeon RX 7500 XT

- Pros: 10 GB GDDR6, support for FSR 4.0.

- Cons: Higher price ($230 compared to $199 for GTX 460 v2 ES).

Intel Arc A580

- Pros: Better performance in Vulkan projects.

- Cons: Driver issues with older games.

NVIDIA RTX 3050 8GB

- Pros: Presence of RT cores.

- Cons: Price ($249) and TDP (140 W).

7. Practical Tips

- Power Supply: Choose models with an 80+ Bronze certification and above (e.g., Corsair CX550).

- Compatibility: The card works with PCIe 4.0 but is also compatible with PCIe 3.0 (up to a 5% performance loss).

- Drivers: Regularly update the software through GeForce Experience—NVIDIA actively optimizes for support in new games.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Price of $199—one of the lowest on the market.

- Support for DLSS Light and FSR 3.0.

- Energy efficiency.

Cons:

- No hardware ray tracing.

- Limited memory bandwidth.

- Noisy cooling system.

9. Final Conclusion: Who Should Choose the GTX 460 v2 ES?

This graphics card is an ideal choice for:

1. Gamers with a budget of up to $500 for the whole PC. For 1080p gaming, it offers an excellent price-to-performance ratio.

2. Streamers, who don’t need ultra-realistic graphics but value stability.

3. Office users who occasionally play games.

If you're willing to pay an additional $50–70, the RTX 3050 or RX 7500 XT will offer more capabilities. But for those seeking the lowest price without major compromises, the GTX 460 v2 ES is a strong candidate.

Prices are current as of April 2025 and are listed for new devices in retail outlets in the USA.

Basic

Label Name

NVIDIA

Platform

Desktop

Launch Date

September 2011

Model Name

GeForce GTX 460 v2 ES

Generation

GeForce 400

Bus Interface

PCIe 2.0 x16

Transistors

1,950 million

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

40 nm

Architecture

Fermi 2.0

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

1280MB

Memory Type

GDDR5

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

256bit

Memory Clock

1002MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

128.3 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

10.91 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

43.62 GTexel/s

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

87.19 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

1.067 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

SM Count

Multiple Streaming Processors (SPs), along with other resources, form a Streaming Multiprocessor (SM), which is also referred to as a GPU's major core. These additional resources include components such as warp schedulers, registers, and shared memory. The SM can be considered the heart of the GPU, similar to a CPU core, with registers and shared memory being scarce resources within the SM.

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

336

L1 Cache

64 KB (per SM)

L2 Cache

512KB

TDP

160W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

N/A

OpenCL Version

1.1

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 (11_0)

CUDA

2.1

Power Connectors

2x 6-pin

Shader Model

5.1

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Suggested PSU

450W

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

1.067 TFLOPS

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

Quadro K1200

1.128 +5.7%

GeForce GTX 480 Core 512

1.1 +3.1%

GeForce GTX 460 v2 ES

1.067

GeForce GTX 460 v2

1.025 -3.9%

Quadro 6000

1.007 -5.6%