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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
196 Comments
View All Comments
arjunp2085 - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
For dealing with suck fake geometry, Fermi has several new tricks.is that supposed to be such??
850 Watts for SLI.. man Air Conditioning for my room does not consume that much electricity
Might have to go for industrial connections to use such high Electricity consumptions lol
Green Team NOT GREEN....
Leyawiin - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
Guess I'll keep my GTX 260 for a year or so more and hope for better days.hangfirew8 - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
Launch FAIL.All this waiting and a paper launch. They couldn't even manage the 1/2 dozen cards per vendor at Newegg of some previous soft launches.
All this waiting an a small incremental increase over existing card performance. High power draw and temps. High prices, at least they had the sense not to price it like the 8800Ultra-which was a game changer. It had a big leap in performance plus brought us a new DX level, DX10.
I've been holding off buying until this launch, I really wanted nVidia to pull something off here. Oh, well.
softdrinkviking - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
so by the time a "full" gf100 is available, how close will we be the the next gen AMD card?and how low will be the prices on the 58XX series be?
this article never made an explicit buying recommendation, but how many people out there are still waiting to buy a gf100?
6 months is a long time.
after xmas and the post holiday season, anybody on the fence about it (i.e. not loyal nvidia fans) probably just went for amd card.
so the question (for a majority of potential buyers?) isn't "which card do i buy?", it's "do i need/want to upgrade from my 58xx amd card to a gf100?"
also, i'm curious to find out if fermi can be scaled down into a low profile card and offer superior performance in a form factor that relies so heavily on low temps and low power consumption.
the htpc market is a big money maker, and a bad showing for nvidia there could really hurt them.
maybe they won't even try?
shin0bi272 - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
great review as usual here at Anandtech. I would have thought in your conclusions you would have mentioned that, in light of the rather lack luster 5% performance crown that they now hold, that it wasnt the best idea for them to disable 6% of their cores on the thing after all.Why make a 512 core gpu then disable 32 of them and end up with poorer performance when youre already 6 months behind the competition, sucking up more juice, have higher temps and fan noise, and a higher price tag? That's like making the bugatti veyron and then disabling 2 of its 16 cylinders!
That will probably be what nvidia does when amd releases their super cypress to beat the 480. They'll release the 485 with all 512 cores and better i/o for the ram.
blyndy - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
"Fermi is arranged as 16 clusters of 32 shaders, and given that it is turning off 64 shaders, it looks like the minimum granularity it can fuse off is a single cluster of 32. This means it is having problems getting less than two unrecoverable errors per die, not a good sign."from: http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/12/21/nvidia-cast...">http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/12/21/nvidia-cast...
shin0bi272 - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
dont quote semi accurate to me. If you wanna call 1 in 100 claims being correct as Semi accurate then fine you can... me I call it a smear. Especially since the guy who wrote that article is a known liar and hack. If you google for gtx480 and click on the news results and click on semi accurate you will see its listed as satire.Jamahl - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
the same Ryan Smith who panned the 5830 for being a "paper launch" even though it was available one day later?What's wrong this time Ryan? Maybe there are so many bad things to say about Fermi, being "paper launched" was well down the pecking order of complaints?
AnandThenMan - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
I was thinking the same thing. The 5830 got slammed for being a paper launch even though it wasn't, but Fermi gets a pass? Why? This isn't even a launch at all despite what Nvidia says. Actual cards will be available in what, 17 days? That's assuming the date doesn't change again.jeffrey - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
I'll third that notion.Even though Ryan Smith mentioned that Fermi was paper launched today, the tone and way that the article read was much harsher on AMD/ATI. That is ridiculous considering that Ryan had to eat his own words with an "Update" on the 5830's availability.
To be tougher on AMD/ATI, when they did in fact launch the 5830 that day and have hard-launched, to the best of their ability, the entire 5XX0 stack gives an impression of bias.
A paper launch with availability at least two and a half weeks out for a product six months late is absurd!