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
Left 4 Dead
Introduced in 2004, Valve’s Source engine continues to live on in new Valve games. At this point even newer Source games like Left 4 Dead are rarely GPU limited to a significant degree, but we keep it on here due to the fact that we’re expecting at least one more Source game this year in Portal 2.
Breaking from tradition a bit, for L4D we’ve gone ahead and cranked up the AA to 8x. The quality difference is tiny at best, but it was necessary to try to keep the GTX 480 and 5870 from getting more than 100fps at 2560 (and it still wasn’t enough for the 5870). With that said we see a dramatic reversal from HAWX – the GTX 400 series loses its first game. The GTX 480 falls behind by 6-9% while the GTX 470 falls behind by anywhere between 1 and 15%. Interestingly on the GTX 470 in particular, the gap grows with resolution; perhaps we’re seeing the ROP loss come to haunt us?
In any case, if you’re going to lose a game, L4D is not a bad game to lose at. Even the GTX 275 gets over 60fps at 2560, so while it’s a loss on paper there’s little practical difference..
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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.