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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Ryan Smith - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Yes, we did. We were running really close to the limits of our 850W Corsair unit. We measured the 480SLI at 900W, which after some power efficiency math comes out to around 750-800W actual load. At that load there's less extra space than we'd like to have.Just to add to that, we had originally been looking for a larger PSU after talking about PSU requirements with an NVNDIA partner, as the timing of this required we secure a new PSU before the cards arrived. So Antec had already shipped us their 1200W PSU before we could test the 850W, and we're glad since we would have been cutting it so close.
bigboxes - Sunday, March 28, 2010 - link
Appreciate the reply.GullLars - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
OK, so 480 generally beats 5870, and 470 generally beats 5850, but at higher prices, temperatures, wattage, and noise levels. What about 5970?As far as i can tell, the 5970 beat or came even with 480 in all tests, draws less power, runs cooler, and makes less noise. The price isn't that much more either.
It seems more fair to me to compare 480 with 5970 as both are the fastest single-card (as in PCIe slot) sollutions and are close in price and wattage.
I would also like to see what framerate FPS games come in at with gamer settings (1680x1050 and 1920x1200 resolutions), and if average is higher than game cutoff or tickrate, what is the minimum FPS, and how much can you bump eyecandy before avg drops below cutoff/tickrate or minimum drops below acceptable (30).
The reason for gamers sacraficing visuals to get high FPS can be summarized to game flow and latency. If FPS is below game tickrate, you get latency. For many games the tickrate is around 100 (100 updates in the game engine pr second). At 100 FPS you have 10ms latency between frames, if it drops to 50 you have 20 ms, and at 25 you have 40 ms. Lower than 25-30 FPS will obviously also result in virtually unplayable performance since aiming will becoming hard, so added latency from FPS below this becomes moot. If you are playing multiplayer games, this is added to the network latency. As most gamers know, latency below 30ms is generally desired, and above 50ms starts to matter, and above 100ms is very noticable. If you are on a bad connection (or have a bad connection to the server), 20-30ms added latency starts to matter even if it isn't visually notable.
bigboxes - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Anyone else getting that message? I finally had to turn off the 'attack site' option in FF. It wasn't doing this last night. It's not doing it all over AT, just on the GTX 480 article.GullLars - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Here too, it listed among others googleanalytics.com as a hostile site.It was probebly because NVidia wasn't happy with the review XD
(just joking ofc)
chrisinedmonton - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Great article. Here's a small suggestion; temperature graphs should be normalised to room temperature rather than to 0C.GourdFreeMan - Sunday, March 28, 2010 - link
I agree. Temperature graphs should either be normalized to the ambient environment or absolute zero; any other choice of basis is completely arbitrary.Ahmed0 - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Uh oh, my browser just got a heartwarming warning when I clicked on this article, the warning said that it might infect my computer badly and that I should definitely run home faster than my legs can carry.So, whats up with that?
Lifted - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
I just got that too. Had to disable the feature in Firefox.NJoy - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
well, Charlie was semi-accurate, but quite right =))What a hot chick... I mean, literately hot. Way too hot