NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470: 6 Months Late, Was It Worth the Wait?

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• GTaudiophile - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link

  Me thinks that Cypress really blindsided nVidia. And then on top of it being such an efficient chip, you throw in Eyefinity and all of the audio over HDMI features, etc.
  
  Talk about a smack down.

• AnnihilatorX - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link

  Page 2:
  
  Finally we bad news: availability. This is a paper launch;

• simtex - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link

  With the current console generation being the primary focus of game developers I find it hard to believe that tessalation will get the big breakthrough anytime soon. With the next-gen console, it will come, but that is few years from now, and hopefully at that time we have seen at least one new generations of GPUs.

• viewwin - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link

  I would like a test to see how the new cards do at video encoding.

• Philip123 - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link

  These things are not "single slot cards" They are double slot. They take 2 slots. No review should be published without pointing out performance per watt. If you dont publish performance per dollar which includes the 100 watt premium over 3 years you are not doing your job. Only and idiot would buy anything from nvdia. You really think anyone is going to want fan noise from these monstrosities anywhere near them?
  
  SHAME SHAME SHAME.
  Throw this bullshit in the garbage and tell nvidia to f-off untill it releases an actual computer graphics product instead of a spaceheater for retarded monekeys with developmental disablities.

• AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link

  You are so wrong.
  
  You talk about dual-slot cards as if it's a bad thing--it's the best design currently possible, since it allows for efficient cooling without much fan noise, and the heat goes outside your case. Plus, AMD's 5870 & 5850 are also dual slot!
  
  "No review should be published without pointing out performance per watt" - what gamer cares about that? That's a concern for server farmers!

• 529th - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link

  I think people would be interested in seeing these cards overclocked, also seeing the 470 in SLI

• cobra32 - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link

  
  So Nvidia's fastest card is 11% faster than AMD's mid level card 5870 and AMD's top card the 5970 is allot faster than the 480 GTX. Do not give me that the 5970 is a two chip card and cannot be compared to a single chip card. Sorry guys the 5970 takes up one slot just like the 480 GTX and is faster and consumes less energy to move things on the screen faster. If I got 3 slots on my motherboard I can have 6 video chips with an ATI while with a nvidia setup I can have only 3 at the most. Until Nvidia has a two chip version which looks impossible with this power hunger design. ATI has the top single card, be that two chips, you can buy. It took them 6 months and still cannot buy one paper launches suck. I have bought several Nvidia Cards and like them all but this one really looks to fall short. If I got one slot to put my video card in, ATI has the highest performing Card I can buy 5970. It's like this would I rather have a single core chip or dual core cpu and that's a no brainer two is always better than one.

• Roland00 - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link

  Two things
  You can only have 4 gpus in nvidia or ati multi gpu setups. That means two 5970s not 3. (well you can have 4 gpus and one physX)
  
  Second crossfire doesn't scale well past 2 cards, sli doesn't scale well past 3.

• derrida - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link

  Thank you Ryan for including OpenCL benchmarks.