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
Crysis: Warhead
It’s been over 2 years since the release of the original Crysis, and “but can it run Crysis?” is still a common question even today. With a mix of dense foliage, long draw distances, and high quality textures, Crysis is still a game that can bring any machine to its knees, and is our first choice for testing any video card.
As far as this first game is concerned, things are looking so-so for NVIDIA. For the GTX 480, it’s in a solid 10-12% lead over the 5870, and unsurprisingly losing to the 5970. For the GTX 470 things are less rosy; it basically is breaking even with the 5850. Furthermore there’s an interesting pattern in our averages: the gap between the GTX 400 series and the Radeon 5000 series shrinks with resolution. Keep an eye on this, it’s going to be a repeating pattern.
We’ve also gone ahead and recorded the minimum framerates for Crysis, as in our testing we’ve found the minimums to be very reliable. And in doing so, we have some data even more interesting than the averages. The GTX 400 series completely tramples the 5000 series when it comes to minimum framerates, far more than we would have expected. At 2560 Crysis is approaching a video RAM limitation in our 1GB and under cards, which gives the GTX 480 cards a clear lead at those resolutions. But even at lower resolutions where we’re not video RAM limited, the GTX 480 still enjoys a 33% lead in the minimum framerate, and the GTX 470 is well ahead of the 5850 and even slightly ahead of the 5870.
For whatever reason AMD can’t seem to keep up with NVIDIA when it comes to the minimum framerate, even at lower resolutions. Certainly it’s obvious when the 1GB cards are video RAM limited at 2560, but if we didn’t have this data we would have never guessed the minimum framerates were this different at lower resolutions.
Finally we have a quick look at SLI/CF performance. CF seems to exacerbate the video RAM limitations of the 5000 series, resulting in the GTX 480SLI coming in even farther ahead of the 5870CF. Even at lower resolutions SLI seems to be scaling better than CF.
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kc77 - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Yeah I mentioned it too. ATI got reamed for almost a whole entire page for something that didn't really happen. While this review mentions it in passing almost like it's a feature.gigahertz20 - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
"The price gap between it and the Radeon 5870 is well above the current performance gap"Bingo, Nvidia may have the fastest single GPU out now, but not by much, and there are tons of trade offs for just a little bit more FPS over the Radeon 5870. High heat/noise/power for what? Over 90% of gamers play at 1920 X 1200 resolution or less, so even just a Radeon 5850 or Crossfired 5770's are the best bang for the buck.
If all your going to play at is 1920 X 1200 or less, I see no reason why educated people would want to buy a GTX 470/480 after reading all the reviews for Fermi today. Way to expensive and way to hot for not much of a performance gain, maybe it's time to sell my Nvidia stock before it goes down any further over the next year or so.
ImSpartacus - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
"with a 5th one saying within the card"Page 2, Paragraph 2.
Aside from minor typos, this is a great article.
cordis - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
Hey, thanks for the folding data, very much appreciated. Although, if there's any way you can translate it into something that folders are a little more used to, like ppd (points per day), that would be even better. I'm not sure what the benchmarking program you used is like, but if it folds things and produces log files, it should be possible to get ppd. From the ratios, it looks like above 30kppd, but it would be great to get hard numbers on it. Any chance of that getting added?Ryan Smith - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
I can post the log files if you want, but there's no PPD data in them. It only tells me nodes.cordis - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Eh, that's ok, if you want to that's fine, but don't worry about it too much, it sounds like it was an artificial nvidia thing. We'll have to wait for people to really start folding on them to see how they work out.ciparis - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
I had a weird malware warning pop up when I hit page 2:"The website at anandtech.com contains elements from the site googleanalyticz.com"
I'm using Safari (I also saw someone with Chrome report it). I wonder what that was all about...
Despoiler - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
I'd like to see some overclocking benchmarks given the small die vs big die design decisions each company made.All in all ATI has this round in the business sense. The performance crown is not where the money is. ATI out executed Nvidia in a huge way. I cannot wait to see the financial results for each company.
LuxZg - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Agree.. No overclocking at all..feels like big part of review missing. With GTX480 having that high consumption/temperatures, I doubt it would go much further, at least on air. On the other hand, there are already many OCed HD58xx cards out there, and even those can easily be overclocked further. With as much watts of advantage, I think AMD could easily catch up with GTX480 and still be a bit cooler and less power hungry. And less noisy as a consequence as well of course.randfee - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
very thorough test as expected from you guys, thanks... BUT:Why on earth do you keep using an arguably outdated core i7 920 for benchmarking the newest GPUs? Even at 3,33GHz its no match for an overclocked 860, a comman highend gaming-rig cpu these days. I got mine at 4,2GHz air cooled?!
sorry... don't get it. On any GPU review I'd try to eliminate any possible bottleneck so the GPU gets limited more, why use an old cpu like this?!
anyone?