NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470: 6 Months Late, Was It Worth the Wait?
by Ryan Smith on March 26, 2010 7:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Battlefield: Bad Company 2
The latest game in the Battlefield series - Bad Company 2 - is another one of our new DX11 games and has been a smash hit at retail. It’s also surprisingly hard on our GPUs, enough so that we can say we found something that’s more demanding than Crysis. As BC2 doesn’t have a built-in benchmark or recording mode, here we take a FRAPS run of the jeep chase in the first act, which as an on-rails portion of the game provides very consistent results and a spectacle of explosions, trees, and more.
Unfortunately for NVIDIA this is another losing game for them, and at times they lose big. The GTX 480 comes in at 20% behind the 5870 at 1920, while the GTX 470 comes in behind the 5850 by a similar degree at the same resolution. Interestingly we’re once again seeing a narrowing of the gap as resolutions increase – at 2560, it’s a 9%/7% gap respectively. Given the popularity of the game this really isn’t a game you want to be losing at, particularly by double-digit percentages at 1920.
As FRAPSing the chase scene in BC2 doesn’t provide us with a suitable degree of reliability for minimum framerates, we have gone ahead and engineered our own test for minimum framerates. In the 3rd act there is a waterfall that we have found to completely kill the framerate on even the fastest systems, and in play testing we have found that this isn’t too far off from the minimum framerates we find in multiplayer games. So we’re going to use this waterfall test as a stand-in for minimum framerates on BC2.
Even with a pair of cards in SLI or Crossfire, at 2560 it’s a struggle to stay above 30fps, with only the GTX 480 SLI regining supreme. In fact the performance on this benchmark is quite different from our earlier benchmark all around. Instead of losing the GTX 400 series wins in a big way - a 9% loss in the chase is a 42% lead for the GTX 480 here, and the 470 attains a 35% lead. At first glance we don’t believe that this is a video RAM limitation like we saw in Crysis, but we’re going to have to wait for AMD to ship their 2GB 5870s before we can fully rule that out.
In the mean time it looks like we have two different outcomes: the Radeon 5000 series has the better average framerate (particularly at 1920), but it’s the GTX 400 series that has the better minimum framerate. If you absolutely can’t stand a choppy minimum framerate, then you may be better off with a GTX 400 card so that you can trade some overall performance for a better minimum framerate.
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kc77 - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Yeah I mentioned it too. ATI got reamed for almost a whole entire page for something that didn't really happen. While this review mentions it in passing almost like it's a feature.gigahertz20 - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
"The price gap between it and the Radeon 5870 is well above the current performance gap"Bingo, Nvidia may have the fastest single GPU out now, but not by much, and there are tons of trade offs for just a little bit more FPS over the Radeon 5870. High heat/noise/power for what? Over 90% of gamers play at 1920 X 1200 resolution or less, so even just a Radeon 5850 or Crossfired 5770's are the best bang for the buck.
If all your going to play at is 1920 X 1200 or less, I see no reason why educated people would want to buy a GTX 470/480 after reading all the reviews for Fermi today. Way to expensive and way to hot for not much of a performance gain, maybe it's time to sell my Nvidia stock before it goes down any further over the next year or so.
ImSpartacus - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
"with a 5th one saying within the card"Page 2, Paragraph 2.
Aside from minor typos, this is a great article.
cordis - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
Hey, thanks for the folding data, very much appreciated. Although, if there's any way you can translate it into something that folders are a little more used to, like ppd (points per day), that would be even better. I'm not sure what the benchmarking program you used is like, but if it folds things and produces log files, it should be possible to get ppd. From the ratios, it looks like above 30kppd, but it would be great to get hard numbers on it. Any chance of that getting added?Ryan Smith - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
I can post the log files if you want, but there's no PPD data in them. It only tells me nodes.cordis - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Eh, that's ok, if you want to that's fine, but don't worry about it too much, it sounds like it was an artificial nvidia thing. We'll have to wait for people to really start folding on them to see how they work out.ciparis - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
I had a weird malware warning pop up when I hit page 2:"The website at anandtech.com contains elements from the site googleanalyticz.com"
I'm using Safari (I also saw someone with Chrome report it). I wonder what that was all about...
Despoiler - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
I'd like to see some overclocking benchmarks given the small die vs big die design decisions each company made.All in all ATI has this round in the business sense. The performance crown is not where the money is. ATI out executed Nvidia in a huge way. I cannot wait to see the financial results for each company.
LuxZg - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Agree.. No overclocking at all..feels like big part of review missing. With GTX480 having that high consumption/temperatures, I doubt it would go much further, at least on air. On the other hand, there are already many OCed HD58xx cards out there, and even those can easily be overclocked further. With as much watts of advantage, I think AMD could easily catch up with GTX480 and still be a bit cooler and less power hungry. And less noisy as a consequence as well of course.randfee - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
very thorough test as expected from you guys, thanks... BUT:Why on earth do you keep using an arguably outdated core i7 920 for benchmarking the newest GPUs? Even at 3,33GHz its no match for an overclocked 860, a comman highend gaming-rig cpu these days. I got mine at 4,2GHz air cooled?!
sorry... don't get it. On any GPU review I'd try to eliminate any possible bottleneck so the GPU gets limited more, why use an old cpu like this?!
anyone?