GTX 470/480: Non-3D Performance Considerations

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sethk

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So the battle rages on regarding the cost and value of the GTX, mainly based around performance in current games and benchmarks.

I guess because everyone in rushing out benchmarks so quickly, I've seen very little analysis of anything other than 3D benchmarks and heat / power. But reading through several reviews I did gather some information that affects my purchase decision as much as the 3D scores:

  • Integrated Audio. Finally. No one seemed to get into any details regarding this. Does it work with current versions of PowerDVD / Corel with Blu-rays and True-HD / DTS Master? Any stutter / pops / anomalies with current drivers?
  • Video (Movies). What's new? Any picture quality enhancements? Driver / compatibility issues with common apps and codecs? This is stuff I really want to know about, because after all, people do more than play games with their video cards, for many it's also their Home Theater front end.
    Also, I was interested to see the Badaboom video encoder / transcoder performance. I wish MediaCoder performance was included too, since that's a free, open-source CUDA video encoder that can do both CPU (x64) and mixed CPU/CUDA encoding for a 300% speedup. I've used it on my GTX 260 rig, and I would like to see how much of a speedup I would see.
  • Size / Fit. OK so many reviews did talk about this, but video card lengths (and thickness) are getting ridiculous. I couldn't fit my 5870 into my HTPC case. I'm glad that the power connectors are on the top, but this is still a long card (480). Better than really long AND power connectors at the end though.
  • Heat / Noise / Power. Again, plenty of discussion of this in reviews. This is the one that dissuaded me from pre-ordering today. 92C in Crysis is not good. I'm OK with dismissing Furmark temps, but if Crysis is causing 92 degree temps, that's bad. Same thing with the noise - those noise numbers are terrible! I'm going to wait for the "485" or possibly a fully custom board design that addresses temperatures and noise. Disappointed with the power numbers, but that doesn't concern me too much, I'm not looking at SLI.
  • 3D Image Quality. Other than some reviews of the updated transparency AA (which sounds like it's currently mildly broken, causing undue performance drops, I didn't see much in regards to a detailed image quality analysis. Overall it sounds like the only thing I'd notice over my current video cards is the improved transparency. Sadly we don't have a lot of real world DX11 game examples for in-depth analysis, most of what's out there is either tacked on or a benchmark.
  • Multi-monitor / 3D. Not there on day 1. Sad. At least HDMI 1.3a and the 3D portion of 1.4 are supported out of the box. 3D Blu-ray sounds cool, surprised more reviews (and Nvidia) didn't talk more about it.

What other non-3D performance concerns did you think of that current reviews did not address adequately?
 
I'd say physics performance. That wasn't addressed separately.
 
From: http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3783&p=2

Speaking of audio, let’s quickly discuss the audio/video capabilities of the GTX 400 series. GF100 has the same audio/video capabilities as the 40nm GT 200 series launched late last year, so this means NVIDIA’s VP4 for video decoding (H.264/MPEG-2/VC-1/MPEG-4 ASP) and internal passthrough for audio. Unfortunately the latter means that the GTX 400 series (and other first-generation Fermi derivatives) won’t be able to match AMD’s Radeon 5000 series in audio capabilities – NVIDIA can do compressed lossy audio(DD/DTS) and 8 channel uncompressed LPCM, but not lossless compressed audio formats such as DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD. This leaves the HTPC crown safely in AMD’s hands for now.
 
2D performance. Basically, what can you do with GF100 before it starts ramping up to 3D clocks? To be honest, I think this is much more important than 3D power consumption, since most people won't have their cards at load all the time, but will have them at idle, doing normal 2D stuff. That's where power consumption really hurts.
 
Anand has done cuda benches. The most relevant one to people here I suspect will be the folding bench which has the 480 3.5x faster than the 285, although one bench has a full 8x gain so farther improvement may be possible by tweaking the code to better fit the new architecture.
 
Mr. Pedantic said:
2D performance. Basically, what can you do with GF100 before it starts ramping up to 3D clocks? To be honest, I think this is much more important than 3D power consumption, since most people won't have their cards at load all the time, but will have them at idle, doing normal 2D stuff. That's where power consumption really hurts.
Click to expand...

[H] touched on that

Idle power usage for the GTX 470 and GTX 480 was better than we expected. NVIDIA has a handle on keeping the power down when it is not needed. Worth keeping in mind though, when we say "idle" we mean "idle." Even light browsing or pretty much any kind of computer usage kicks the power usage up very quickly. It was not uncommon to see the GTX 470 and GTX 480 jump 50 watts with the opening of a web page.
Click to expand...

sethk said:
Video (Movies). What's new? Any picture quality enhancements? Driver / compatibility issues with common apps and codecs? This is stuff I really want to know about, because after all, people do more than play games with their video cards, for many it's also their Home Theater front end.
Also, I was interested to see the Badaboom video encoder / transcoder performance. I wish MediaCoder performance was included too, since that's a free, open-source CUDA video encoder that can do both CPU (x64) and mixed CPU/CUDA encoding for a 300% speedup. I've used it on my GTX 260 rig, and I would like to see how much of a speedup I would see.
Click to expand...

I don't think Nvidia added anything new in the video area. Basically what you'd get out of a GT 240 is what you'll get out of a GTX 480 - which is fine since anyone buying these already has a CPU that could handle video decoding anyway, so there really isn't any need for improved hardware video decoding.

That said, techPowerUp covered card power draw watching a Blu-Ray movie and the GTX 480 used 85w (compared to 40w from the 5870): http://techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_480_Fermi/30.html

Size / Fit. OK so many reviews did talk about this, but video card lengths (and thickness) are getting ridiculous. I couldn't fit my 5870 into my HTPC case. I'm glad that the power connectors are on the top, but this is still a long card (480). Better than really long AND power connectors at the end though.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't put a GTX 480 into an HTPC. Its power and heat requirements won't work well in an HTPC - unless you're deaf.

3D Image Quality. Other than some reviews of the updated transparency AA (which sounds like it's currently mildly broken, causing undue performance drops, I didn't see much in regards to a detailed image quality analysis. Overall it sounds like the only thing I'd notice over my current video cards is the improved transparency. Sadly we don't have a lot of real world DX11 game examples for in-depth analysis, most of what's out there is either tacked on or a benchmark.
Click to expand...

Both ATI and Nvidia already have "perfect" 3D image quality - there isn't really anything left to improve on.

Multi-monitor / 3D. Not there on day 1. Sad. At least HDMI 1.3a and the 3D portion of 1.4 are supported out of the box. 3D Blu-ray sounds cool, surprised more reviews (and Nvidia) didn't talk more about it.
Click to expand...

LegitReview covered multimonitor power and temperature: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1258/15/

If you run dual monitors on a GTX 480 your idle power usage jumps ~80w and the idle temp is 90C.
 
As someone who doesn't play games, I'm really excited about this release. Will probably pick up an evga FTW watercooled edition soon as i figure out if the 480 is worth it vs the 470 for 3d renders.
 
ph0b0s said:
From: http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3783&p=2

Speaking of audio, let’s quickly discuss the audio/video capabilities of the GTX 400 series. GF100 has the same audio/video capabilities as the 40nm GT 200 series launched late last year, so this means NVIDIA’s VP4 for video decoding (H.264/MPEG-2/VC-1/MPEG-4 ASP) and internal passthrough for audio. Unfortunately the latter means that the GTX 400 series (and other first-generation Fermi derivatives) won’t be able to match AMD’s Radeon 5000 series in audio capabilities – NVIDIA can do compressed lossy audio(DD/DTS) and 8 channel uncompressed LPCM, but not lossless compressed audio formats such as DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD. This leaves the HTPC crown safely in AMD’s hands for now.
Click to expand...

I did see that, but the techPowerUp review says:
"NVIDIA has included an HDMI sound device inside their GPU which does away with the requirement of connecting an external audio source to the card for HDMI audio. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.3a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit. NVIDIA also claims full support for the 3D portion of the HDMI 1.4 specification which will become important later this year when we will see first Blu-Ray titles shipping with support for 3D output."
This is in direct contradiction of what AT says in their review.
 
watanabe said:
As someone who doesn't play games, I'm really excited about this release. Will probably pick up an evga FTW watercooled edition soon as i figure out if the 480 is worth it vs the 470 for 3d renders.
Click to expand...

What software are you using that uses GPU acceleration for anything other than the realtime view?
 
sethk said:
[*]Heat / Noise / Power. Again, plenty of discussion of this in reviews. This is the one that dissuaded me from pre-ordering today. 92C in Crysis is not good. I'm OK with dismissing Furmark temps, but if Crysis is causing 92 degree temps, that's bad.
Click to expand...

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=2221282&postcount=110

The card will shut itself down if it reaches 106° C according to this post. He ran Furmark @ 70% fan speed, but he did also do it with 100% fan speed and the card still reached 99° C when inside a case. In addition to your card size case problems, very good airflow design in that case to allow air to reach this card will be of paramount importance.
 
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