www.guru3d.comOuch! My fingers hurt from typing. Hey, you know what, I definitely like both the GeForce GTX 470 and 480. Performance wise things are looking very solid, even with early Beta drivers. Would this series have been released six months ago, everybody would have been hysterical with raving reviews. But yeah... there of course was this company called ATI who definitely got their stuff right at first try and ran away like a dog with a nice fresh meaty bone to chew on. The bar was set pretty high by ATI alright.
Admittedly while very strong, both the GeForce GTX 470 and 480 are not a slam dunk homerun compared to the fastest ATI 5800 series single GPU solutions. The reference Radeon HD 5870 keeps up with the GTX 480 pretty well on many occasions and a stinging fact is that its price is gradually dropping towards 429 USD, coming down from 469 USD (which is an interesting fact all by itself as it was launched at 399 USD). ATI reaps mucho benefits from the release of their Catalyst 10.3 driver (used in this review). The new driver brings significant performance boosts throughout the Radeon HD 5800 and 5900 series. Performance was enhanced in a lot of game titles. Would ATI not have released Catalyst 10.3 on time, then this review would have looked different. You'll probably notice a review or two out on the web using older drivers.
The fun thing is, in a couple of months the same thing will happen for NVIDIA with new drivers, 10% here, 7% there .. hey, that's how it works.
Even so, when we tally up the results out of all titles tested, the GeForce GTX 480 wins nearly everywhere except in Anno 1404 and ironically 3DMark Vantage. There are scenarios where the GTX 480 is very close to the 5870, but there are also scenarios where the GTX 480 completely and utterly kicks the Radeon HD 5870 in the proverbial nuts. What surprised me was the fact that say from 1280x1024 up-to 1920x1200 NVIDIA seems stronger than the competition. And at 2560x1600 things tend to equalize a much more.
When we focus solely on the GTX 480 now for a minute, substandard and topic of discussion obviously has to be the TDP -- the card when stressed will utilize nearly 250 Watts and that certainly is pretty steep power consumption, especially compared to ATI's Radeon 5870 with a TDP of only 188W. You are going to need a decently ventilated PC as the heat the GeForce GTX 480 produces is plentiful. Make no mistake, the card will get hot, very hot. So that's definitely something you need to keep in the back of your head.
In the end though, the GeForce GTX 480 is a graphics card that kicks ass, it is without doubt the fastest single GPU based graphics card on the block. The performance is grand and impressive and well, it's just a sick card to play all modern games with at any resolution or image quality preference.
The GeForce GTX 470 then -- obviously this card is lined up against ATI's Radeon HD 5850. It can compete with it quite well. Price wise it's definitely the more interesting of the two cards tested today. We expect that, once volume availability kicks in, this card will drop to roughly 300 USD. Performance wise we are looking at a product that positions itself smack down in the middle ATI's Radeon HD 5850 performance level and as such it's a really nice card to own. TDP wise at 215W we feel that power consumption is reasonable, and much like the GTX 480, we do also need to state that the heat output of the card currently is high but though not as high as the GTX 480. In fact we have a gut feeling that NVIDIA we reprogram the FAN RPM delta real soon, forcing the fan speed RPM at 70% which was not even every noisy, pushed the temperatures back to 80 Degrees C real quickly. Gaming wise the performance is obviously grand and the image quality it outputs is really high ranking as well. Money versus performance wise I'd say the GTX 470 is the winner of the two really.
As this article has shown, the newer software titles will benefit greatly from the new NVIDIA GeForce series 400 graphics cards. Metro 2033 is just stunning to play and when you look at the Just Cause 2 benchmarks all you can do is sit there, watch, with your mouth open. Stunning to look at and the performance is just brilliant combined with massive image quality settings. Consoles .. eat your heart out !
So there you have it you guys, temperatures at and TDP definitely can be considered trivial, but for most of you guys that is a non-issue, you are certainly looking at the fastest GPUs on the block in their respective category. Additional benefits for NVIDIA cards are of course PhysX which definitely is gaining more ground since the last year. It's a nice feature to have, sure... CUDA, we haven't talked about it much just yet. But obviously the GF100 GPUs are fully CUDA ready, in fact the architecture was designed with CUDA in mind. On the compute side of things we know one thing for sure, the GF100 should be impressive.
DX11 performance -- what we noticed in our test sessions is that the GeForce GTX 470 and 480 hold their ground really well in DX11 applications. Tessellation performance is downright terrific, the choice of putting a HW tesselator in each SM (shader cluster) definitely seems to be the right call to make architecture wise.
Now bring on the board partner boards and let's get some more reviews out there. By next week you should see some decent availability in e-tail. And well .. perhaps May 2010 already for the first mid-range class series 400 products ?
www.gamingnexus.com
Yes, Fermi is finally here and yes it's pretty fast. It's the fastest single GPU card out there now and it's the card that NVIDIA purchasers are waiting for. My concern though is that, from reports and NVIDIA's own documents, it might not be an overwhelming speed increase over the 5870 cards. Considering how long the 5870 cards have been out, the numbers might not be what the public are wanting but I've been told that these cards will really show off their goods when more DX11 games come out. We will have to wait for more DirectX 11 games to really see if NVIDIA's statement saying that these cards really shine on next generation games comes true but what it can do now is pretty damn fast. NVIDIA cards do more than just graphics as they provide PhysX acceleration, CUDA support, ray tracing, and 3D gaming. The GeForce GTX 480 offers the fastest experience so far but it might not be what people are hoping for considering the delays. Even so, I am glad to see NVIDIA offering up something new in terms of architecture and I await what they can do in the future with the growth that's possible. For those that want to pick up the card, it will be available the week of April 12, 2010 and NVIDIA is expecting 10s of thousands of units available at that time.
It's fast and it's NVIDIA's king right now. You're going to need a good power supply and a good CPU but for enthusiasts out there that want the fastest single GPU card out there, this is it. Some games don't run with as much improvement over previous generations but it's set for the next generation of games.
www.firingsquad.com
After giving up the single-GPU performance crown to the Radeon 5870 six months ago, NVIDIA’s finally back on top in its long-running war with ATI: the GeForce GTX 480 is without a doubt the new 3D performance champ as far as GPUs go.
Sure, the Radeon 5870 did manage to remain ahead of the GeForce GTX 480 in Crysis with very high settings, and the two boards finished in a virtual dead heat under the game’s high graphics settings, but the GTX 480 definitely delivered a better balance of performance across the 10 different games we tested.
As expected, the GTX 480 really shined in DirectX 11 apps. The card ran 16-19% faster than the Radeon 5870 in Metro 2033, and 13% faster in DiRT 2 at 1920x1200. The GTX 480 wasn’t quite as dominating in STALKER: Call of Pripyat, but a 6% win at 1920x1200 is still a victory. One interesting trend we noticed in STALKER, DiRT 2, Crysis with high settings, and many other titles though was that the Radeon 5870 tended to gain on the GTX 480 at 2560x1600. This could be a sign that the GeForce board isn’t as efficient at handling its available memory bandwidth as the Radeon 5870 is.
When compared to its direct predecessor, the GeForce GTX 285 and 280 (look at the GTX 275 scores to see how a 280 would perform, as we’ve found that it essentially delivers 99.9% of the performance of the GTX 280 in games) you can see that the GTX 480 doesn’t always deliver a 2X performance improvement over the prior generation. In fact, with only a handful of exceptions (most notably Far Cry 2, and thanks to DX11 shaders, STALKER) the GTX 275 SLI setup proved to be faster than GTX 480.
This is the same complaint we had with the Radeon 5870 back in September.
However, our biggest complaint with the GeForce GTX 480 isn’t the lack of a 2X performance improvement over the prior generation, instead it’s the enormous amount of heat the board generates. Under load the board gets scorching hot, you definitely wouldn’t want to make the mistake of touching the 480’s exposed heatpipes after an extended gaming session. GPU temps were typically in the 90 degree range – that’s more than 10 degrees higher than where we’d like them to be ideally.
As a result, this ends up creating an enormous hotspot in your chassis that you’re going to have to deal with. You’ll definitely want to pick up a case with a good side vent that can supply fresh, cool air from outside the chassis to the GPU. And although it’s definitely not overwhelming, the GTX 480 runs louder than the Radeon 5870 too. Quiet operation has been a hallmark of NVIDIA’s high-end boards dating all the way back to the GeForce 7900 GTX, so this is definitely a bit of a departure for NVIDIA.
And finally, $499 is a bit of high price to pay considering that the GTX 480 board doesn’t always deliver a significant improvement over the Radeon 5870, particularly at 2560x1600 as we noted earlier.
Still, if you simply must have the fastest GPU on the planet, look no further than the GeForce GTX 480.
Similarly, the GeForce GTX 470 generally outruns its competitor, the Radeon 5850. The showing isn’t quite as dominant as the GTX 480 was over the 5870 though, with the 5850 sweeping all of our performance testing with Crysis, and it also manages to pull ahead of the GTX 470 in games like Bad Company 2, Resident Evil 5, and DiRT 2 at 2560x1600. Again, this could be an indication that the Radeon boards are a little more efficient at handling their memory bandwidth. Technically the 470 has a slight bandwidth advantage over the 5850 (133.9GB/sec vs 128GB/sec).
The GTX 470 really shined against the 5850 in Metro 2033, Far Cry 2, Batman, and Modern Warfare 2 though. It even maintained a double-digit lead over the 5850 in the ATI sponsored DX10.1 game HAWX at 1600x1200 and 1920x1200. In DX11 apps like DiRT 2 the GTX 470’s edge ranged from 7-9% at those same resolutions, and slimmed to 6% in STALKER.
It doesn’t run as loud or as hot as the GeForce GTX 480 either, although we still think the GPU temps are a bit too high. Again, ideally you don’t want to see your GPU temps go above 80 degrees, and some enthusiasts even scoff at that. So NVIDIA’s definitely missed the mark in this regard with both GeForce GTX 400 boards.
One aspect of the GTX 400 boards that’s a little more difficult to cover today is the future. More specifically, how extensively will game developers incorporate DX11 features like tessellation? Clearly with their new PolyMorph Engines, NVIDIA’s betting big that game devs will crank the tessellation up to 11, as seen in something like Unigine’s Heaven benchmark, where the GTX 470 manages to outrun the Radeon 5870 even under the benchmark’s “moderate” tessellation setting. If this is indicative of the direction game developers will take with their upcoming DX11 titles, the future for the GeForce GTX 400 boards looks extremely bright – clearly this is the more future-proof architecture.
The question is, how soon should we expect scenes like Heaven to become the norm in games rather than the exception? It’s certainly challenging for someone like Unigine to put together a fancy benchmark filled with eye candy, but it’s an even greater challenge to deliver that level of visuals and still deliver a game that’s playable. Just ask Crytek.
By the time we do get games that really push the limits of what DX11 can do, the GTX 400 and Radeon 5800 cards may be a distant memory.
If you’re a performance junkie who must have the fastest hardware money can buy, or you need a long term investment that’s going to last you for a few years, and you don’t mind the power and heat concerns, the GeForce GTX 470 and 480 would be the safer bet, provided you can afford to pay the premium NVIDIA’s asking for them. ATI’s once again going for that sweet spot, price/performance gamer that doesn’t necessarily crave the absolute highest frame rates, but instead delivers good performance, good thermals, and more attractive pricing. And of course, for that ultra enthusiast who wants the very best, the Radeon 5970 is still the world’s fastest graphics card (even if they’re nearly impossible to find in stock online).
Going forward, it will be interesting to see which direction NVIDIA goes next. Will they follow ATI’s strategy, and target the $100-$200 segment dominated by the Radeon 5700, or go straight for the OEMs with a Radeon 5400/5500 competitor? Enthusiasts on a budget would love to see a competitor for the recently introduced Radeon 5830.
We’ll also be keeping a close eye on availability. Clearly TSMC still isn’t able to crank out enough 40-nm GPUs to keep up with demand, which has led to higher GPU prices. The GPU price wars from a year ago probably won’t return until this situation is resolved, which is obviously going to disappoint a lot of gamers.
At least the Radeon 5800 series finally has some competition though. Or at least, it will in a few weeks. For the sake of NVIDIA and their board partners, they can’t afford any more delays…
www.bjorn3d.com
Well we are afraid time beat us this round. We have other content we would like to post but it will have to take the form of a tack on to the review. Still left untouched due to time constraints, StoneGiant DX11 Benchmark, 3D Surround and 3DVision Surround, CUDA and a few games. We beat the GTX-480 for about 72 hours in a six day time frame and we are impressed with it both in performance and endurance.
The 3 Billion transistors stuffed on the 480 cores really churn out the eye candy and the newly restructured core is more efficient at Tessellation and Ray Tracing than anything we've seen to date. Performance remained high no matter what we threw at the GTX-480 and the only potential problem we have seen with it so far is heat. It responds very very well to ultra high AA/AF levels and we saw games looking like nothing we've ever seen. Crysis was absolutely beautiful at high AA/AF and frames were flying by,
You stuff 3 Billion transistors on a 40nm process and 1.5 GB of ram and all the feature this chip packs you can expect some heat. We saw thermals running as high as 95°C in Furmark, Stalker and Heaven. Nvidia assures us that the GPU is fine up to 105°C but we expect aftermarket air and water cooling to be popular on the GTX-480. Figure the power of the GTX-295 dual core GPU packed into a single core GPU and toss on half a ton of new features the GTX-295 never dreamed of. One small note while in the throws of benchmarking fatigue I accidentally pulled the GPU out of the rig while it was still hot and got a 1st degree burn. It's that hot so be careful and make sure your chassis is well ventilated and if running SLI separate the cards by one PCI-E slot. Planning on Triple SLI plan on water cooling.
Fermi represents a quantum leap in GPU graphics and computing. It's a little bit of a bet on games embracing Tessellation and Ray Tracing but Nvidia hedged their bet by equaling the performance of the GTX-295 without the new technologies factoring in. Play a game with Tessellation and/or Ray Tracing and performance is more than double.
We like what GTX-480 represents, which is what Nvidia is taking a notice of what developers and end users want, and we are sure every vendor does. Nvidia seems to go that extra step and not only notice what end users want but goes beyond that and sends teams to help implement the technology. Optimizes code on games to run faster, produces a GPU the scientific community can embrace and use as relatively low cost supercomputers. Provides the toolboxes developers need to use the technology and takes a bottom up view of their role in GPU production.
It's an old concept but one often forgotten in business today. Look at what the end users want and give them more than that. Once you have the product the end user wants, make it easy for him to use. Nvidia has excelled at that and provides the team to help implement and teach the developers how to use the tools they have given them.
Getting back to the GTX-480 it's massively powerful and we expect it to be some time before developers catch up to the copious bounty Nvidia has provided with the GTX-480 and Fermi lineup. Expect them available at your local E-Tailor on April 12th, 2010 and the MSRP is $499 for the GTX-480 and expected to be $350 for the GTX-470. Nvidia assures us that there are tens of thousands of GPU's available for retail sale at launch so we shouldn't see much if any bottleneck on supply to demand.
Being late to market with a DirectX 11 GPU may hurt them a little and price points and market saturation with DirectX 11 capable GPU's at lower price points should be a priority for Nvidia. With two flagship GPU's hitting shelves in April we would like to see a 460 model at a lower price point but still in the enthusiast class. Then we'd like to see some mainstream offerings with Fermi's design at lower price points. With GT200 it wasn't as important to push mid-range cards because they weren't saturating the market with DX11. Now that Nvidia is DX11 capable we would expect them to want to saturate every price point with DX11 capable cards and spread the joy that is Fermi as widely as possible.
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Summary: The Nvidia GTX-480 brings a lot to the table and the feast it lays out is succulent. With 480 exposed cores, double the previous generations cores, 15 streaming processors, 60 texture units, 1.5GB of GDDR5 and a 384 bit memory bus the GTX-480 extrudes mind blowing raw power. Backing up all that muscle is a half ton of new features previous generations of Nvidia GPU's can only dream about. The 40nm manufacturing process placing 3 Billion transistor at Fermi's command is a formidable engineering feat. Then give Fermi what it needs for Ultra AA/AF, Ray Tracing, and Tessellation this is one eye candy feast you shouldn't pass up. We could say more about the GTX-480 but our 3DVision glasses have recharged and the next 6 or 7 hours we are going to play Crysis the way it was meant to be played.
Although the rating and final score mentioned in this conclusion are made to be as objective as possible, please be advised that every author perceives these factors differently at various points in time. While we each do our best to ensure that all aspects of the product are considered, there are often times unforeseen market conditions and manufacturer changes which occur after publication that could render our rating obsolete. Please do not base any purchase solely on our conclusion, as it represents our product rating for the sample received which may differ from retail versions. Benchmark Reviews begins our conclusion with a short summary for each of the areas that we rate.
Our performance rating considers how effective the GeForce GTX480 DirectX-11 video card performs against competing products from both ATI and NVIDIA. While it's not easy to nail-down exact ratios because of driver and game optimizations, the GeForce GTX480 consistently outperformed the ATI Radeon HD5870 and establishes itself as the most powerful single-unit graphics card available. Tested on the unbiased 3dMark Vantage DX10 benchmark, GeForce GTX480 improves upon the GTX285 by nearly 61% at 1920x1200, and outperforms the Radeon HD5870 by 10%. When BattleForge calls high-strain SSAO into action, NVIDIA's GTX480 demonstrates how well Fermi is suited for DX11... improving upon the GeForce GTX285 by nearly 249% while trumping ATI's best single-GPU Radeon HD5870 by 61%. The GeForce GTX480 also proved itself a worthy adversary for the dual-GPU ATI Radeon HD5970; beating it in our Resident Evil 5, Far Cry 2, and BattleForge tests.
www.benchmarkreviews.com
In regard to product appearance, there's no doubting that NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480 will be referred to as the 'toughest' video card they've produced. Exposed heatsink and heat-pipes certainly stand out like exposed exhaust tips do for hot rods, and AICs (such as ASUS) have already decorated the plastic shroud with faux-Carbon Fiber finishes. It remains to be see how created the add-in card partners will be, but variety is guaranteed.
Riding the bleeding edge of technology, NVIDIA has built their GeForce GTX 480 (and likely the GTX 470, too) with solid construction. I'm always concerned for exposed electronics, so it surprises me that they didn't integrate a metal back-plate to add as a heatsink and guard for the PCB components. The top-side of the graphics card features a in-laid heatsink and four exposed heat-pipe rods; both of which get extremely hot. The Fermi GF100 GPU has been moved forward (towards the exhaust vents) by one inch when compared to the GTX 285, which allows the memory and power components to receive optimal cooling first.
While most consumers buy a discrete graphics card for the sole purpose of PC video games, there's a very small niche who expect extra features beyond video fast frame rates. NVIDIA is the market leader in GPGPU functionality, and it's no surprise to see CPU-level technology available in their GPU products. Fermi GF100 is also the first GPU to ever support Error Correcting Code (ECC), a feature that benefits both personal and professional users. Proprietary technologies such as NVIDIA Parallel DataCache and NVIDIA GigaThread Engine further add value to GPGPU functionality.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 video card will be officially available from retailers on 12 April 2010 or sooner. NVIDIA suggests a retail price of $500 for the GeForce GTX 480, and $350 for the GTX 470. Priced at $499.99 each, NewEgg currently lists: the ASUS ENGTX480, EVGA 015-P3-1480-AR, MSI N480GTX-M2D15, Gigabyte GV-N480D5-15I-B, Zotac ZT-40101-10P and even the PNY VCGGTX480XPB. Perhaps by coincidence XFX and BFG are not listing the GeForce GTX 480 at NewEgg; and are the only manufacturers to offer a lifetime product warranty.
In terms of value, there are several ways to look at the GeForce GTX 480 and compare it to the closest rival: the $420 ATI Radeon HD 5870. Some analysts take heat and power into consideration, but for this illustration we'll use only the FPS performance from our tests. Based on the in-game DirectX-11 BattleForge benchmark, gamers who play at 1680x1050 will pay $6.79 per frame of performance with the GeForce GTX 480, as opposed to $9.29 per frame with the Radeon HD 5870. Playing single-player Battlefield: Bad Company 2 at 1920x1200 with maximum settings, you can expect to pay $6.59 with the GeForce GTX 480, or $6.77 with the Radeon HD 5870. Far Cry 2 costs $6.38 per frame for the GeForce GTX 480, while the ATI Radeon HD 5970 costs $8.05 per frame. The GeForce GTX 480 may cost more up front, but it delivers more for the money with regard to video game performance.
In summary, NVIDIA's GF100 Fermi GPU delivers more than just a giant boost to video frame rates over their previous generation, it also delivers GPGPU functionality that is usable in- and outside of video games. Performance increases over the GeForce GTX 285 were dramatic, and often added nearly 300% improvements. Comparing only PC video game frame rate performance between the GTX480 and Radeon HD5870 still puts the 480-core GF100 GPU decisively ahead of the competition by 22-98% in DX10 tests, and 12-63% in DX11. As a whole, NVIDIA video cards generally performed better on the most popular video game titles; and there were at least two games where the GeForce GTX480 performed better than ATI's dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970. There are also added PhysX and DirectX-11 enhancements to help tip the cup well into NVIDIA's favor in terms of user-experience. Conclusion: NVIDIA is back on top again, right where most gamers like to see them.
Pros:
+ Fastest single-unit DX11 graphics accelerator available
+ Best price-to-performance cost ratio
+ GF100 Introduces Error Correcting Code (ECC)
+ Outstanding performance for ultra high-end games
+ Fan exhausts all heated air outside of case
+ Includes native HDMI audio/video output
+ Adds 32x CSAA post-processing detail
+ Supports triple-SLI functionality
Cons:
- Consumes 52W at idle and 370W under full load
- Extremely hot under normal operation
- Very expensive premium-level product
- Cooling fan is audible under load
www.anandtech.com
To wrap things up, let’s start with the obvious: NVIDIA has reclaimed their crown – they have the fastest single-GPU card. The GTX 480 is between 10 and 15% faster than the Radeon 5870 depending on the resolution, giving it a comfortable lead over AMD’s best single-GPU card.
With that said, we have to take pause for a wildcard: AMD’s 2GB Radeon 5870, which will be launching soon. We know the 1GB 5870 is RAM-limited at times, and while it’s unlikely more RAM on its own will be enough to make up the performance difference, we can’t fully rule that out until we have the benchmarks we need. If the GTX 480 doesn’t continue to end up being the fastest single-GPU card out there, we’ll be surprised.
The best news in this respect is that you’ll have time to soak in the information. With a retail date of April 12th, if AMD launches their card within the next couple of weeks you’ll have a chance to look at the performance of both cards and decide which to get without getting blindsided.
On a longer term note, we’re left wondering just how long NVIDIA can maintain this lead. If a 2GB Radeon isn’t enough to break the GTX 480, how about a higher clocked 5800 series part? AMD has had 6 months to refine and respin as necessary; with their partners already producing factory overclocked cards up to 900MHz, it’s too early to count AMD out if they really want to do some binning in order to come up with a faster Radeon 5800.
Meanwhile let’s talk about the other factors: price, power, and noise. At $500 the GTX 480 is the world’s fastest single-GPU card, but it’s not a value proposition. The price gap between it and the Radeon 5870 is well above the current performance gap, but this has always been true about the high-end. Bigger than price though is the tradeoff for going with the GTX 480 and its much bigger GPU – it’s hotter, it’s noisier, and it’s more power hungry, all for 10-15% more performance. If you need the fastest thing you can get then the choice is clear, otherwise you’ll have some thinking to decide what you want and what you’re willing to live with in return.
Moving on, we have the GTX 470 to discuss. It’s not NVIDIA’s headliner so it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. With a price right between the 5850 and 5870, it delivers performance right where you’d expect it to be. At 5-10% slower than the 5870 on average, it’s actually a straightforward value proposition: you get 90-95% of the performance for around 87% of the price. It’s not a huge bargain, but it’s competitively priced against the 5870. Against the 5850 this is less true where it’s a mere 2-8% faster, but this isn’t unusual for cards above $300 – the best values are rarely found there. The 5850 is the bargain hunter’s card, otherwise if you can spend more pick a price and you’ll find your card. Just keep in mind that the GTX 470 is still going to be louder/hotter than any 5800 series card, so there are tradeoffs to make, and we imagine most people would err towards the side of the cooler Radeon cards.
With that out of the way, let’s take a moment to discuss Fermi’s future prospects. Fermi’s compute-heavy and tessellation-heavy design continues to interest us but home users won’t find an advantage to that design today. This is a card that bets on the future and we don’t have our crystal ball. With some good consumer-oriented GPGPU programs and developers taking up variable tessellation NVIDIA could get a lot out of this card, or if that fails to happen they could get less than they hoped for. All we can do is sit and watch – it’s much too early to place our bets.
As for NVIDIA’s ecosystem, the situation hasn’t changed much from 2009. NVIDIA continues to offer interesting technologies like PhysX, 3D Vision, and CUDA’s wider GPGPU application library. But none of these are compelling enough on their own, they’re merely the icing on the cake. But if you’re already in NVIDIA’s ecosystem then the choice seems clear: NVIDIA has a DX11 card ready to go that lets you have your cake and eat it too.
Finally, as we asked in the title, was it worth the wait? No, probably not. A 15% faster single-GPU card is appreciated and we’re excited to see both AMD and NVIDIA once again on competitive footing with each other, but otherwise with much of Fermi’s enhanced abilities still untapped, we’re going to be waiting far longer for a proper resolution anyhow. For now we’re just happy to finally have Fermi, so that we can move on to the next step.
www.hardocp.com
So, GF100 is here, and we’ve been playing new DX11 games on it for a straight week, working ourselves through games such as Metro 2033 and Bad Company 2 and Aliens vs. Predator. Our first impression with the GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470 is that nothing really wowed us in our gaming experiences with the cards. The one thing that stood out in our minds was, "We’ve already been here before," the Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850 have been giving us this same experience since last year. But is not all that bleak when you analyze it.
GeForce GTX 470
Starting from the bottom up, we would say the least relevant video card is the GeForce GTX 470. In all our gameplay testing today, not once did the GeForce GTX 470 provide a superior gameplay experience compared to the Radeon HD 5850, even in Metro 2033. In fact, performance was very close between both video cards, and in some cases the Radeon HD 5850 proved to provide faster framerates. Looking strictly at performance, these video cards are equal.
Of course, we have to look beyond just performance, as metrics such as cost and power consumption come into play. The GeForce GTX 470 is more expensive than the Radeon HD 5850. We are seeing some great deals on Radeon HD 5850 cards starting to crop up, and the fact is that the Radeon 5850 can be purchased with a lot less of your cold hard cash. Looking at power, the GeForce GTX 470 consumes a good bit more power than the Radeon HD 5850, while also producing higher thermals.
The HD 5850 is the clear value winner when compared to the GTX 470. We have been telling you that the Radeon 5850 is the best value in enthusiast video cards since last year and the GTX 470 does nothing to change that.
GeForce GTX 480
The GeForce GTX 480 has more relevance to gaming, but at a higher cost compared to the competition. With the GeForce GTX 480 we saw some situations where it provided a superior gameplay experience compared to the Radeon HD 5870. In Metro 2033 it allowed us to use a higher AA setting, and in Bad Company 2 we could utilize 8X CSAA at 2560x1600. In other games, the GeForce GTX 480 did allow high levels of AA at high resolutions like 2560x1600.
The GTX 480 is quite simply not a "Radeon HD 5870 Killer." We don’t know if we were supposed to think it would be or not, but with the power consumption this beast requires, you would hope it would be providing a bit more performance than it is. We can’t say that any of the real world gameplay advantages blew us away compared to the experience of gaming on a Radeon HD 5870. The Radeon HD 5870 proved to allow high AA settings at 2560x1600 in many games, the same as the GTX 280, just not as high. The only game that clearly favors the GeForce GTX 480 is Metro 2033. (And we know that AMD still has its driver team looking over the final code release of the game and has not yet tweaked for it.) Even in BC2, 8X CSAA isn’t a huge improvement over 4X AA which the HD 5870 allowed at 2560x1600. What is the value to the gamer of being able to use 8XAA instead of 4XAA in Bad Company 2?
We are seeing some trades back and forth; in some games the GTX 480 is slightly faster, in other games the HD 5870 is slightly faster. There wasn’t anything that really stood out, other than Metro 2033. Once again, we have to factor in cost, power, and heat. The GeForce GTX 480 consumes more power than the HD 5870, produces more heat, and costs more money (which might also include the cost of a new PSU). It doesn’t seem like the best value with all this factored in. The only thing that "blew us away" was the heat coming out of the video card and the sound of the fan. If you have not taken a look and a listen to the videos on the previous page, you should.
GeForce GTX 480 SLI
More relevant still is the awesomeness of GeForce GTX 480 SLI performance. We simply were not disappointed in the performance that GTX 480 SLI delivered. We think a large part of that may be the fact that the GTX 480 benefits from a larger framebuffer per GPU. Still, the facts are it provided incredible performance at incredible AA settings at 2560x1600. We can make an educated guess that this configuration will equally impress when using multi-display gaming. NV Surround is not yet supported in the current driver release but we are expecting in within 30 days hopefully. While the price of admission is going to be very high, 3x1 display NV Surround gaming looks as though it will possibly bring a "can of whoopass" to multi-display gaming. SLI will be required for NV Surround 3x1 gaming, but you will be able to use 3 DVI displays natively. No DisplayPort required.
We saw real-world benefits, we think are related to the framebuffer, in Aliens vs. Predator. The Radeon HD 5970 was not able to play with 4X AA at 2560x1600, whereas GeForce GTX 480 SLI was. We also experienced awesome performance in Bad Company 2 with 16X CSAA and 2X TR SSAA that was much more than "playable." Even more impressive was DiRT 2, which we were able to have 8X TR SSAA plus 8X CSAA enabled, for a truly breathtaking visual experience. And get a load of this. GeForce GTX 480 SLI allows Crysis Warhead to be playable at 2560x1600 4X AA/16X AF all Enthusiast settings. Take that to the bank, GTX 480 SLI is the real deal.
The downsides to GTX 480 SLI follow the same pattern as the others, cost, power and thermals. GTX 480 SLI is going to set you back $1000 for the cards alone, and the power requirements are severe. GeForce GTX 480 SLI is very much an extravagant enthusiast only solution.
NVIDIA rules the schoolyard when it comes to multi-GPU scaling. CrossFire gets left with a black eye.
Geometry Performance
The big architectural change with the Fermi architecture is in the pipeline layout and geometry engine. This supposedly will aid in providing very fast Tessellation and other geometry performance. Unfortunately, I don’t think any of the games we have tested here today are really pushing graphics cards in the Tessellation department. Maybe they will in the future, but right now, this doesn’t seem to be the case. And even then, for what we will see in real world gaming, it seems as if the 5800 series is still going to be very competitive in the Tessellation arena.
In that regard, it seems like NVIDIA’s move to re-design its architecture might be ahead of its time. Of course ATI has had Tessellation for years and years, so it was way ahead of the curve as well. The GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 look to have long legs though, and will quite likely remain relevant for a longer period than the Radeon HD 5000 series, at least in terms of raw technology. Only time will tell on that one. At any rate, with the current performance experienced, the enormous power draw, and the cost, it just seems to us like this was a wasted move right now that has only hindered NVIDIA with delays and problems with the Fermi architecture. Right now, the payoff doesn’t seem to be present with this architecture.
The Bottom Line
We see no reason to purchase a GeForce GTX 470. It provides no gameplay advantages compared to the competition, and will actually end up costing you more power and dollars for the exact same performance you can get with the Radeon HD 5850. Factor in the power consumption, and it doesn’t seem worth it. If you have an HD 5850, stick with it, the GTX 470 is not an upgrade. If you are contemplating a great performing graphics card, for a decent price, the HD 5850 is still the best choice.
The GeForce GTX 480 is more relevant in the market but it hasn’t exactly come out of the gate wowing us with performance either. There are some games where it is faster than the Radeon HD 5870, and there are some games where it is even with the Radeon HD 5870. Factor in the cost and power, and include the ability to run Eyefinity on a single GPU, the Radeon HD 5870, to us, seems like the better value for the gamer right now.
GeForce GTX 480 SLI clearly provides a better gameplay experience than the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970. In the dual-GPU competition, we felt GeForce GTX 480 SLI provided the best experience, but it will certainly cost you. It will cost you a lot of money, and it will cost you by requiring a high powered hardcore enthusiast system to support it, again costing you more money. If you are a gamer, and you want the best performance you can get right now, GeForce GTX 480 SLI is where it is at. Just beware of all the consequences of running such a configuration. We are frothing at the bit to get into some NV Surround gaming with a GTX 480 SLI setup!
Overall, GF100 hasn’t exactly delivered. I think we were all hoping it would provide a substantial gameplay improvement over the Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850. Competition is good, and we would like to see it. Unfortunately, our experiences weren’t as positive as we had wanted. When you break it all down to cost, power and performance, the GTX 480 and GTX 470 don’t measure up. The only saving grace is the awesomeness of GTX 480 SLI, but it comes at some high costs.
That all said, the GF100 is not a 5800 or 2900 redo, but it sure makes you think about it.
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Writing a conclusion such as this one is never an easy endeavour since while the benchmarks themselves give a clearly defined numerical value to the performance of a certain product, things like final retail pricing and availability can only be educated guesses at this point. Before we wade face first into either of those sticky situations, let’s look at NVIDIA’s GF100 architecture from an outsider’s perspective and as someone who is familiar with the technology behind it. Most people won’t give two hoots about any of the real technological aspects behind the GTX 480 but will rather look closely at the performance numbers and make a hopefully informed decision based on those. So, as we know some of you will likely skip to this point in the review straight away, let’s start the next part of this conclusion with something which sums things up quite nicely.
There is no denying the fact that the Fermi architecture is extremely ambitious to the point where some would call it over-ambitious. Not only is NVIDIA pushing the limits when it comes to power consumption and heat production but the complexity of their new chips has led to delay after delay. Nonetheless, as you can see in the chart above the GTX 480 redefines performance for single GPU cards and at times does so in a wholly convincing manner. In our opinion the most crucial litmus test for any card in this price category is performance when IQ settings such as anti-aliasing are enabled and the GTX 480 passes here with flying colours. Basically, what is a mere (average) 8-11% lead increases to an average of 15 – 19% when AA is enabled which is impressive to say the least. As we saw, this performance with AA enabled also allows the GTX 480 to draw even with the HD 5870 when it comes to the critical performance per dollar category. Minimum framerates are all-important as well and tell an extremely important story since it is more than obvious NVIDIA’s current flagship provides a much less drastic average / minimum performance delta than the HD 5870.
As with any new architecture, there are still obviously areas for improvement and in the case of the GTX 480 there was a straw that almost broke the camel’s back. Our comparative testing charts were extremely eye-opening since they showed exactly what they were meant to: issues with resolution scaling. In Left 4 Dead 2, Aliens versus Predator, BattleField: Bad Company 2 and Unigine Heaven, we saw what looked to be an insurmountable lead at lower resolutions all but vanish at 2560 x 1600. Thankfully for NVIDIA, the GTX 480 was able to pull its butt out of the fire with strong AA performance. Nonetheless, this is particularly worrying since high resolution gaming is what the GTX 480 was supposedly built for and if it can’t maintain a sizable lead over the HD 5870 in exactly this area, many enthusiasts may question its price premium. We can’t state for a fact whether some of the performance drop-offs we saw at 2560x1600 were due to an architectural issue or immature drivers but it seems everyone we talked to (from fellow editors to NVIDIA themselves) had their own explanations. For now, we’ll keep an open mind and side with NVIDIA’s explanation which stated there are certain driver optimizations which have yet to be implemented.
We have a feeling that heat and power consumption will be issues that will continue to plague this architecture well into the future, at least until a die shrink. There will of course be smaller, much more efficient versions released in the coming months, but they likely won't compete with ATI’s impressive HD 5000-series when it comes to overall power efficiency. Having said that, when it comes to the GTX 480, power consumption isn’t nearly as bad as we thought it would be, but that’s partially because NVIDIA isn’t using a fully decked-out core. As such, performance per watt isn’t in this card’s favour at all. Even with an SM disabled, this is a seriously hot-running piece of silicon that pushes temperatures into the scary-hot 95 degree range, which is shocking considering how fully endowed the heatsink is. Luckily, noise wasn’t too much of an issue on our card when in an enclosed case. We just all have to remember that when push comes to shove, us enthusiasts are usually the first to bitch about power consumption and heat but then look the other way when it comes to the best possible gaming performance.
While pricing may seem good when looking at NVIDIA’s stated SRP of $499 USD, heaven only knows what kind of mark-up retailers will put on these puppies. Talking to our retailer contacts resulted in more waffling about than we care to admit but we are confident that some cards will hit that magical $499 mark or even a bit below as stock becomes readily available. When talking about availability, things become far less tangible since there MAY be some VERY limited stock in the retail channels today. General availability will likely begin somewhere around April 12th but stock of the GTX 480 will continue to be extremely tight for the foreseeable future. To us, this smells like a paper launch but we’ll just have to play the wait and see game.
The GTX 480 isn’t necessarily a resounding success but we consider it to be a good stepping stone towards some much needed competition in the DX11 marketplace. It’s a great performer in exactly the areas where it will be most utilized while being backed up by an extremely respectable price. But, it just doesn’t deliver the much-needed knock-out blow to ATI’s offerings. The main problem we see is understandably high expectations which may be tempered by NVIDIA’s failure in two areas: to deliver a flagship product that fully utilizes the architecture’s full, 512-core potential and actually launch the card with real retail volume in Q1 2010. Instead, it looks like we will still be waiting to see what this architecture can really offer with 512 cores and potential customers may not get their cards for another two weeks. Heat and power consumption are also two areas which raise red flags. To us, this isn’t exactly the greatest way to kick off the next generation.
www.hardwareheaven.com
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