So, I have ordered a Galaxy GTX 460 GC 768MB graphics card to replace my EVGA 9500 GT 1GB, to get better performance out of my games, obviously. When I received it, I was surprised as to how big this thing was. It was about as big as one of them thick PC game cases you see. I was excited to see how much of an improvement this graphics card had over my old 9500 GT. It was factory overclocked, so this thing has to be really fast! Well... after I installed the card, I pulled up GTA IV (the PC version) and guess what?
Absolutely NO real FPS increase whatsoever. It was still at 10-20 FPS. And it had little stutters that I haven't seen with the 9500 GT. I was thinking "but this is GTA IV, it's CPU-intensive", so I launched the complimentary copy of Mafia II that I got with the card... at the lowest settings the game was constantly shifting between 30 to 10 FPS. Oh my God! This can't be happening! This fucking card is supposed to be one of the best on the market and it performs a bit worse than my 9500 GT?
I put it through 3Dmark11, on the graphics tests, it was running 10-15 FPS. Fucking bullshit. I paid almost 140 USD for this abysmal performance?!?
Again, this is supposed to be one of the top dogs in the graphics card market, but this dog was neutered! So I looked online, and there was a lot of posts about users complaining about how badly the Nvidia GTX 460 (no matter which brand) performed (and other GTX 400-series cards, apparently) and a lot of fixes suggested by fellow users that did not do a DAMN thing to improve performance.
Instead of spending several hours looking for a fix, I said "you know what, this is 20-fucking-11, if something doesn't work out of the box like it is supposed to, then it ain't going to work, EVER!", and decided to try to return this big piece of plastic and silicone shit to Amazon, and get a refund. I'm just going to stick with what works from now on!
I have put the 9500 GT back into my computer, and I think the graphics card is mad at me for cheating on it, because it is playing games with me now! When I turn on the computer, no video shows up. I turn off the computer, hook my monitor to the other DVI port on the graphics card (it has two), and then it worked! This happened both last night and this morning. Otherwise, the 9500 GT seems to work just fine.