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
Wolfenstein
Finally among our revised benchmark suite we have Wolfenstein, the most recent game to be released using the id Software Tech 4 engine. All things considered it’s not a very graphically intensive game, but at this point it’s the most recent OpenGL title available. It’s more than likely the entire OpenGL landscape will be thrown upside-down once id releases Rage later this year.
The most distinguishing result in this benchmark is that it once again shows the Radeon and GeForce performance gap closing with resolution, with the GTX 480 going from a 15% lead to a fraction of a percentage loss by the time we reach 2560. The GTX 470 shares a similar story, however it ends up with a more definite loss by the end. Given the framerates we’re seeing at 1680, it’s likely that we’re CPU limited and are seeing driver overhead come in to play.
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yacoub - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
I think he's got it right. If you want high yields, a larger chip size is the enemy, because you get fewer chips per die, and thus lower yields.Rebel44 - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
IMO HardOCP review was better because they showed real world differences between those Nv and AMD cards - 470 didnt allow better setting than 5850 and 480 was only little bit better than 5870. So 470 is IMO epic fail at that price.When you add extra power and noise fom 470 and 480, I wouldnt pay for them more than for 5850 and 5870.
stagen - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
With the 470 and 480 generating so much heat and noise, and consume more power than even the dual GPU Radeon HD 5970, even thinking of dual GPU 470/480 (495?) is a scary thing to do.yacoub - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
Agreed. And considering the $350 470 is no faster than a $150 5770 at 1680x in BF:BC2, and only 23% faster at 1920x, that's pathetic. Considering how much better it does in other games, it must be a driver optimization issue that hopefully can be worked out.mcnabney - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Fermi has existed for months, so the driver work should be as far along as AMD. The delay allowed for better stepping and higher clocks, but the drivers aren't going to improve any more quickly than AMD.uibo - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
What was the ambient temperature?Ryan Smith - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
20C.mindbomb - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
Firmly in AMD's hands?i dont know about that.
Although it can't bitstream true hd and dts-MA, I would argue that's not really as debilitating as not being able to bitstream level 5.0 h264 video, since you can output as LCPM.
Galid - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
FIRMLY in AMD's hand...it is... not only Nvidia doesn't do true HD and dts-ma for a card that doesn't fit in a HTPC but they won't even when they get the smaller cards out... Firmly? yeah....mindbomb - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
let me be more clear.I'm saying although the ati cards have better handling of audio, the nvidia cards do in fact have better handling of video since they can handle level 5.0 and 5.1 h264 video (and i guess mpeg 4 asp, but thats irrelevant)
so i wouldn't say the ati cards have a definite lead in this area.