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
Battlefield: Bad Company 2
The latest game in the Battlefield series - Bad Company 2 - is another one of our new DX11 games and has been a smash hit at retail. It’s also surprisingly hard on our GPUs, enough so that we can say we found something that’s more demanding than Crysis. As BC2 doesn’t have a built-in benchmark or recording mode, here we take a FRAPS run of the jeep chase in the first act, which as an on-rails portion of the game provides very consistent results and a spectacle of explosions, trees, and more.
Unfortunately for NVIDIA this is another losing game for them, and at times they lose big. The GTX 480 comes in at 20% behind the 5870 at 1920, while the GTX 470 comes in behind the 5850 by a similar degree at the same resolution. Interestingly we’re once again seeing a narrowing of the gap as resolutions increase – at 2560, it’s a 9%/7% gap respectively. Given the popularity of the game this really isn’t a game you want to be losing at, particularly by double-digit percentages at 1920.
As FRAPSing the chase scene in BC2 doesn’t provide us with a suitable degree of reliability for minimum framerates, we have gone ahead and engineered our own test for minimum framerates. In the 3rd act there is a waterfall that we have found to completely kill the framerate on even the fastest systems, and in play testing we have found that this isn’t too far off from the minimum framerates we find in multiplayer games. So we’re going to use this waterfall test as a stand-in for minimum framerates on BC2.
Even with a pair of cards in SLI or Crossfire, at 2560 it’s a struggle to stay above 30fps, with only the GTX 480 SLI regining supreme. In fact the performance on this benchmark is quite different from our earlier benchmark all around. Instead of losing the GTX 400 series wins in a big way - a 9% loss in the chase is a 42% lead for the GTX 480 here, and the 470 attains a 35% lead. At first glance we don’t believe that this is a video RAM limitation like we saw in Crysis, but we’re going to have to wait for AMD to ship their 2GB 5870s before we can fully rule that out.
In the mean time it looks like we have two different outcomes: the Radeon 5000 series has the better average framerate (particularly at 1920), but it’s the GTX 400 series that has the better minimum framerate. If you absolutely can’t stand a choppy minimum framerate, then you may be better off with a GTX 400 card so that you can trade some overall performance for a better minimum framerate.
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Sunburn74 - Sunday, March 28, 2010 - link
It is absolutely ridiculous. Like having a buzzsaw in your case.http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/03/26/nvidia_f...">http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/03/26/nvidia_f...
Belard - Sunday, March 28, 2010 - link
AMD already stated they are not reducing their pricing any time soon. This is because their line-up is far healthier than Nvidia.They know (and we should know) that the $500/$350 price for the new GeForce 4 cards are not going to stick. There is only some many thousands of cards available for the next 3~5 months. The supply will run dry in about 1-3 weeks I bet. We're going to see the pricing shoot up close to $600 for the GF480, the fanboyz will be willing to pay that price.
The 5850 was supposed to be a $250 card, we see how well that worked out. While the price did settle around $300, the 5850 was still a better value than the $370~400 GeForce 285 card as it was far faster and run cooler, etc. The 5870 is typically faster than the $500 GeForce 295 - for $100 less. ATI has no reason to lower their pricing.
The GeForce 265~295 cards are already being phased out, too slow, cost too much.
So nVidia has nothing for the sub $300 market... nothing. Only the GF-250 has any value but a tad expensive as it should be $100 since its still a DX10 re-badged 9800GTX.
So when ATI feels any pressure from Nvidia, they can easily drop their prices. It costs $5000 per wafer, no matter how many chip dies are on it. It may be costing nVidia $150~200 per chip while for AMD, they could be paying $20~35 per chip used in the 5800/5900s.
Then you add the costs for memory, the PCB, parts, cooling system etc.
It is very easy for AMD to drop $50 per GPU and they'd still make a profit while Nvidia sells their geForce 400 cards at a loss or no profit.
When ATI sells the 5830 for $190~200, 5850 at $250 and 5870 at $325~350 would help sales and keep nVidia at bay.
We'll see...
SirKronan - Sunday, March 28, 2010 - link
I would've liked to see 5850's in crossfire thrown into this mix. I know you don't have time to test them all, but I think that's the key competitor against the 480 when it comes to bang/buck. I would think the 5850's in crossfire could handily beat the 295 and the 480, all while consuming less power. I believe there may have been another site that did it, but with this excellent and very thorough review done here, it would've been even that little tiniest bit sweeter to have a 5850 crossfire line on their graphs.Regardless, thanks for the informative review!
B3an - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
This review and any other pages on this site are not working in Firefox... they have been reported as attack pages."This web page at www.anandtech.com has been reported as an attack page and has been blocked based on your security preferences."
This is why FF with all default settings, and just using adlock.
Could it be trouble with the ads again using a malware/virus?
Ryan Smith - Sunday, March 28, 2010 - link
We know. It's being worked on.Sunburn74 - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
The 5850 idles inthe mid 30's but it also does absolutely nothing to stay cool, operating at about 20% max fan speed. Under load it may go up to 30% fan speed, but rarely ever breaks the 40% mark.What are the approximate idle and load fan speeds for both the gtx 480 and 470? I guess I'm asking this to understand just how much extra cooling room is innately available. Are these card working at max capacity to keep cool or is there thermal/fan headroom there to be had?
Ryan Smith - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
I don't have that data on-hand (we don't record fan speeds), but it's something that I should be able to easily grab at a later time.Lemonjellow - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
For some reason Chrome is flagging this article as a malicious sight... Oddness... Possibly got a bad advertisement...NJoy - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
well, Charlie was semi-accurate, but quite right =))What a hot chick... I mean, literately hot. Way too hotWiNandLeGeNd - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Looking back at the data, I realized that power consumption is for system total. Guru3d measured the power consumption of the card itself and reported a max of 263W, so roughly 21 A. I think my 850W will do just fine since each PCI-X con has 20A each.