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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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.