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
The Test
With the launch of the GTX 400 series, we have gone ahead and completely rebuilt our benchmark suite. This includes rotating out several games for several new games, giving us a nice mix of DX9/10 and DX11 games. Everything else has been rebenchmarked using the latest drivers, and our power data has changed as we installed an Antec 1200W PSUin order to keep up with the potential power demands of a pair of GTX 480s in SLI.
For the AMD cards, we used AMD’s Catalyst 10.3a drivers along with the latest driver profile update. For NVIDIA’s cards NVIDIA supplied us with their Forceware 197.17 drivers, which only work for the GTX 400 series. For the rest of the NVIDIA cards we used the 197.13 drivers.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Intel DX58SO (Intel X58) |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | OCZ Summit (120GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 5970 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850 AMD Radeon HD 5830 AMD Radeon HD 5770 AMD Radeon HD 5750 AMD Radeon HD 4890 AMD Radeon HD 4870 1GB AMD Radeon HD 4850 AMD Radeon HD 3870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 197.13 NVIDIA ForceWare 197.17 AMD Catalyst 10.3a |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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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.