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
The Test
With the launch of the GTX 400 series, we have gone ahead and completely rebuilt our benchmark suite. This includes rotating out several games for several new games, giving us a nice mix of DX9/10 and DX11 games. Everything else has been rebenchmarked using the latest drivers, and our power data has changed as we installed an Antec 1200W PSUin order to keep up with the potential power demands of a pair of GTX 480s in SLI.
For the AMD cards, we used AMD’s Catalyst 10.3a drivers along with the latest driver profile update. For NVIDIA’s cards NVIDIA supplied us with their Forceware 197.17 drivers, which only work for the GTX 400 series. For the rest of the NVIDIA cards we used the 197.13 drivers.
CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
Motherboard: | Intel DX58SO (Intel X58) |
Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
Hard Disk: | OCZ Summit (120GB) |
Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 5970 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850 AMD Radeon HD 5830 AMD Radeon HD 5770 AMD Radeon HD 5750 AMD Radeon HD 4890 AMD Radeon HD 4870 1GB AMD Radeon HD 4850 AMD Radeon HD 3870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT |
Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 197.13 NVIDIA ForceWare 197.17 AMD Catalyst 10.3a |
OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
196 Comments
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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