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
DIRT 2
Codemasters latest racing game marks the return of a racer to our benchmark suite. As the first DX11 racer, DIRT 2 makes pretty through use of the DX11’s tessellation abilities, not to mention being the best looking racer we have ever seen.
Edit: Since several of you have asked, this is on the retail version of DIRT 2 with the 1.1 patch, not the demo
DIRT 2 may have started life as an AMD sponsored game, but here it’s all about NVIDIA. The GTX 480 wins by 7-31%, and the 470 by anywhere from 1 to 20%. Once again we’re seeing the gap close with resolution, with the GeForces and Radeons only barely separated at 2560. SLI/CF scaling is a different story though; until 2560, CF scales better than SLI, leading to only a small gap between the GTX 480SLI and 5870CF at 1920.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
196 Comments
View All Comments
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.