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
Left 4 Dead
Introduced in 2004, Valve’s Source engine continues to live on in new Valve games. At this point even newer Source games like Left 4 Dead are rarely GPU limited to a significant degree, but we keep it on here due to the fact that we’re expecting at least one more Source game this year in Portal 2.
Breaking from tradition a bit, for L4D we’ve gone ahead and cranked up the AA to 8x. The quality difference is tiny at best, but it was necessary to try to keep the GTX 480 and 5870 from getting more than 100fps at 2560 (and it still wasn’t enough for the 5870). With that said we see a dramatic reversal from HAWX – the GTX 400 series loses its first game. The GTX 480 falls behind by 6-9% while the GTX 470 falls behind by anywhere between 1 and 15%. Interestingly on the GTX 470 in particular, the gap grows with resolution; perhaps we’re seeing the ROP loss come to haunt us?
In any case, if you’re going to lose a game, L4D is not a bad game to lose at. Even the GTX 275 gets over 60fps at 2560, so while it’s a loss on paper there’s little practical difference..
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GTaudiophile - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Me thinks that Cypress really blindsided nVidia. And then on top of it being such an efficient chip, you throw in Eyefinity and all of the audio over HDMI features, etc.Talk about a smack down.
AnnihilatorX - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Page 2:Finally we bad news: availability. This is a paper launch;
simtex - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
With the current console generation being the primary focus of game developers I find it hard to believe that tessalation will get the big breakthrough anytime soon. With the next-gen console, it will come, but that is few years from now, and hopefully at that time we have seen at least one new generations of GPUs.viewwin - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
I would like a test to see how the new cards do at video encoding.Philip123 - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
These things are not "single slot cards" They are double slot. They take 2 slots. No review should be published without pointing out performance per watt. If you dont publish performance per dollar which includes the 100 watt premium over 3 years you are not doing your job. Only and idiot would buy anything from nvdia. You really think anyone is going to want fan noise from these monstrosities anywhere near them?SHAME SHAME SHAME.
Throw this bullshit in the garbage and tell nvidia to f-off untill it releases an actual computer graphics product instead of a spaceheater for retarded monekeys with developmental disablities.
AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
You are so wrong.You talk about dual-slot cards as if it's a bad thing--it's the best design currently possible, since it allows for efficient cooling without much fan noise, and the heat goes outside your case. Plus, AMD's 5870 & 5850 are also dual slot!
"No review should be published without pointing out performance per watt" - what gamer cares about that? That's a concern for server farmers!
529th - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
I think people would be interested in seeing these cards overclocked, also seeing the 470 in SLIcobra32 - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
So Nvidia's fastest card is 11% faster than AMD's mid level card 5870 and AMD's top card the 5970 is allot faster than the 480 GTX. Do not give me that the 5970 is a two chip card and cannot be compared to a single chip card. Sorry guys the 5970 takes up one slot just like the 480 GTX and is faster and consumes less energy to move things on the screen faster. If I got 3 slots on my motherboard I can have 6 video chips with an ATI while with a nvidia setup I can have only 3 at the most. Until Nvidia has a two chip version which looks impossible with this power hunger design. ATI has the top single card, be that two chips, you can buy. It took them 6 months and still cannot buy one paper launches suck. I have bought several Nvidia Cards and like them all but this one really looks to fall short. If I got one slot to put my video card in, ATI has the highest performing Card I can buy 5970. It's like this would I rather have a single core chip or dual core cpu and that's a no brainer two is always better than one.
Roland00 - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Two thingsYou can only have 4 gpus in nvidia or ati multi gpu setups. That means two 5970s not 3. (well you can have 4 gpus and one physX)
Second crossfire doesn't scale well past 2 cards, sli doesn't scale well past 3.
derrida - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Thank you Ryan for including OpenCL benchmarks.