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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ReaM - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
I don't agree with final words.480 is crap. Already being expensive it adds huge power consumption factor only to have a slightly better performance.
However (!), I see a potential for future chips and I can't wait for a firmy Quadro to hit the market :)
Patrick Wolf - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
6 months and we get a couple of harvested, power-sucking heaters? Performance king, barely, but for what cost. Cards not even available yet. This is a fail.This puts ATI in a very good place to release a refresh or revisions and snatch away the performance crown.
dingetje - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
exactly my thoughtsand imo the reviewers are going way to easy on nvidia over this fail product (except maybe hardocp)
cjb110 - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
You mention that both of these are cut-down GF100's, but you've not done any extrapolation of what the performance of a full GF100 card would be?We do expect a full GF100 gaming orientated card, and probly before the end of the year, don't we?
Is that going to be 1-9% quicker or 10%+?
Ryan Smith - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
It's hard to say since we can't control every variable independent of each other. A full GF100 will have more shading, texturing, and geo power than the GTX 480, but it won't have any more ROP/L2/Memory.This is going to heavily depend on what the biggest bottleneck is, possibly on a per-game basis.
SlyNine - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Yea and I had to return 2 8800GT's from being burnt up. I will not buy a really hot running card again.poohbear - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Oh how the mighty have fallen.:( i remember the days of the 8800gt when nvidia did a hard launch, released a cheap & excellent performing card for the masses. W/ the fermi release u would never know its the same company. Such a disappointment.descendency - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
I think the MSRP is lower than $300 for the 5850 (259) and lower than $400 for the 5870 (379). Just thought that was worth sharing.I have to believe that the demand will shift back evenly now and price drops for the AMD cards can ensue (if nothing else, the cards should go to the MSRP values because competition is finally out). I would imagine the price gap between the GTX480 and the AMD 5870 could be as much as $150 dollars when all is said and done. Maybe $200 dollars initially as this kind of release almost always is followed by a paper launch (major delays and problems before launch = supply issues).
AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
...for two reasons: power and die size.So the 5870 and 470 appear to be priced similarly, while the 5870 beats it in virtually every game and uses 47W less at load! That is a TON of additional on-die power (like 30-40A?).
We saw this coming last year when Fermi was announced. Now AMD is better positioned than ever.
IVIauricius - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
I see why XFX started making ATI cards a few years ago with the 4000 series. Once again nVidia has made a giant chip that requires a high price tag to offset the price of manufacturing and material. The same thing happened a few years ago with the nVidia GTX200 cards and the ATI 4000 cards. XFX realized that they weren't making as much money as they'd like with GTX200 cards and started producing more profitable ATI 4000 cards.I bought a 5870 a couple months ago for $379 at newegg with a promotion code. I plan on selling it not to upgrade, but to downgrade. A $400 card doesn't appeal to me anymore when, like many posters have mentioned, most games don't take advantage of the amazing performance these cards offer us. I only play games like MW2, Borderlands, Dirt 2, and Bioshock 2 at 1920x1080 so a 4870 should suffice my needs for another year. Maybe then I'll buy a 5850 for ~$180.
First post, hope I didn't sound too much like a newbie.
-Mauro