NVIDIA Fermi - GTX 470 - GTX 480 - GTX 480 SLI Review @ [H]

piscian18 said:
Between the reviews, heat, and price point of the GTX480 I have to say fix the card, make it cheaper and I might be interested. I don't think this statement is unreasonable.
Click to expand...

hd38xx series is proof it can happen just not soon enough.
 
Dan_D said:
...AMD on the other hand got down to brass tacks and asked the question "How do we improve the gaming experience today?" That resulted in Eyefinity. Personally I think that's the biggest thing to hit the gaming world in a long time. Yeah we've seen it from Matrox and through software before, but not like this. We've never seen it done this well. Their own GPU is a computational power house in itself. But first and foremost AMD seemed to have concentrated on the gaming experience in the here and now while NVIDIA seems to be playing two or three moves ahead.

Though truly only time will tell as to who actually made the right call. My guess is that when we find out we'll have another GeForce FX like fiasco, or an ATI Rage 128 as compared to the VooDoo cards of the day. One thing I am certain of is that for better or for worse we will be seeing Fermi derived GPUs for a very LONG time. Possibly as long as we've been seeing G80 variants.
Click to expand...

I'll never forget my experience with the Rage Fury (way before ArtX and R300, of course). I kept the card for two solid weeks doing my best to get the darn thing to work to some approximation of my V3 card (or V2/TNT, can't quite recall what I had). I was writing and receiving emails from one of the actual ATi driver programmers for the Rage drivers--and even he couldn't get the darn thing working for me as advertised--so I took it back for a refund in the end. But I remember giving that card everything I had at the time to little avail--just wasn't in the same league as the 3dfx/nV competition of the day. I can truthfully say with experience from those days that ATi's drivers really did *suck* beyond belief...;) But that chapter in ATi's history ended with R300, thank goodness. The improvement since then was so radical it's kept me in the ATi camp ever since R300.

Yea, it's just a darn shame 3dfx dropped the ball--but that's really ancient history. Even more bizarre, considering all of the acrimony and bad blood between 3dfx and nVidia PR at the time, that it was nVidia that actually absorbed and engulfed the remnants of 3dfx.

Ah, the stories I remember! 3dfx got truckloads of bad publicity near the end which I think were entirely and completely undeserved: I have a really wild anecdote from the time from AnandTech, but it's all history now so no point in telling it again--you caught me in a pensive mood....;) (Can you imagine the fact that not too long from now people like you and me and a few others--like Kyle--will be the only ones around who even remember 3dfx and its contributions and its demise? That's the thing about "getting older"--it never stops...;) Well, I mean, it does stop someday but let's not talk about that!)

I actually really have enjoyed Kyle's takes on EyeFinity--a great deal of good and solid and practical information--just the kind I like to see. When I get around to it I'm sure I'll go with the 3-monitor setup max. I'm just really sensitive to those bezels in the other 6-monitor configuration--completely destroys the "suspension of disbelief" that I enjoy in a game. I'm really not sure if I can go with the bezel presence in the 3-monitor config although that has to be nowhere near as objectionable as the bezels in the 6-monitor config. Heck, when I bought my current 27.5" 1920x1200 LCD I thought I had reached nirvana...;)
 
once again, nvidia has disappointed us with some shitty cards that hardly beats there competition while providing heat for the cold and big bills for the poor, what a fuckin waste of time nvidia, and yet you still failed.
 
Great review.(unlike the 5830 fiasco last month).would like to get a gtx 470. seems like a good deal.but the 480? better unlock all of the sp's and up the clocks if you want me to buy it.are you listing nvidia/tsmc?
 
crap, my GTX260 is barely on the bottom of the charts these days ... yet it seems more than fast enough for everything for me ...
 
It is good to see some availability (even if limited) prior to the April 12th date. That's a good sign.
 
I see alot of complaints about the heat on the card with the review and the comments here.. but no mention (unless I missed it) of atleast a couple reviews now saying that if you manually set the control speeds for the fan to 70% it'd run under 80c (and if you could live with the noise running the fan at 100% then it'd be in the mid 60c range). According to Overclockers club atleast and if I'm not mistaken that was with the card OC'd quite decently.

Maybe there will be drivers to fix the issues.. or maybe it just goes to show how much NVidia believes that the card can handle these temperatures. Its obviously not an issue with the card not being able to deal with the heat.. its just trying to do it in the most noise free way possible. I'd have to question if that decision may somehow hinder the ambient temperatures of the case and thus effect the OC ability of for instance the CPU, but if that's the case then there's always manually setting the fan speed.
 
Just to give an example,I set my GTX 285 at 70% fan speed when gaming. Even after hours of playing games like Crysis or STALKER,it rarely tops 60c. So 80c at 70% is quite a jump.
 
michael.pa2 said:
Just to give an example,I set my GTX 285 at 70% fan speed when gaming. Even after hours of playing games like Crysis or STALKER,it rarely tops 60c. So 80c at 70% is quite a jump.
Click to expand...

Agreed, but that 80c is with it running Furmark which is way more demanding on the GPU then any game is. While I doubt it'd be running at 60c or maybe even 70c its hardly the 95c that everyone quotes from reviews if it manually set (at a reasonable noise level) rather then auto controlled.
 
Last edited:
BladeSpirits said:
I see alot of complaints about the heat on the card with the review and the comments here.. but no mention (unless I missed it) of atleast a couple reviews now saying that if you manually set the control speeds for the fan to 70% it'd run under 80c (and if you could live with the noise running the fan at 100% then it'd be in the mid 60c range). According to Overclockers club atleast and if I'm not mistaken that was with the card OC'd quite decently.

Maybe there will be drivers to fix the issues.. or maybe it just goes to show how much NVidia believes that the card can handle these temperatures. Its obviously not an issue with the card not being able to deal with the heat.. its just trying to do it in the most noise free way possible. I'd have to question if that decision may somehow hinder the ambient temperatures of the case and thus effect the OC ability of for instance the CPU, but if that's the case then there's always manually setting the fan speed.
Click to expand...

Problem with this is that most people dont like to listen to Boing 747 taking off just next to them :)

 
BladeSpirits said:
If that's 3-way.. what would 4-way look like since they've announced that now?
Click to expand...

probably like this

Space_Planet_Explosion_010521_.jpg
 
Last edited:
Yeh but thats only if its running 100%... at 70% the reviewer found it quite reasonable on noise. So again.. heat not as big an issue as people make out. Noise isn't as big an issue either and if you wanted a silent rig theres always water cooling. Which just leaves power consumption which is a beast, but since when have people started really caring about that?

Considering its $200 less then a 5970 and preforms just as well if not better where it matters.. I can live with that. No it won't get me 120FPS in BC2, but I can't notice over half of that anyway. It will get me playable framerates in Metro 2033 though with the eyecandy on. And its proven to do quite well in scaling with SLi meaning I can keep this in my rig for a long time and when I run into another game that I can't get playable framerates.. then I'll just add another when hopefully the prices have dropped some.
 
Last edited:
Where does GTX480 performs "just as well" as 5970 ? GTX480 performs a bit better than 5870, but it is pretty far from 5970.
 
faugusztin said:
Where does GTX480 performs "just as well" as 5970 ? GTX480 performs a bit better than 5870, but it is pretty far from 5970.
Click to expand...

That all depends on the game. As I said yeh it won't get the framerates of the 5970 in most games like BC2, but it gets enough that a human wouldn't be able to tell the difference, but it does show promise with DX11 games (not some afterthought plugin like Dirt 2 did) with high AA. The card preforms exceptionally well in high tesselation shown with the Uniengine 2.0, but Metro 2033 showed this is also true with games

metro-2560-bar.jpg

And goes on to even say "We ran Metro 2033 with Advance DOF disabled because it brought all of the cards but the GTX 480 to an unplayable state."

And yeah obviously that'll improve some whenever ATI gets some drivers out for it, but I doubt it'd be enough to make the extra $200 pricetag on that 5970 worth it. This is even more true with SLi versus Crossfire where the 5970 scales horribly and even the 5870 can't match.
 
but if you compare to the [h] review
5970 able to do very high @ 2560*1600 with tessellation min 20 max 56 avg 36.6 vs
480 that does high @ 1920*1080 with tessellation min 20 max 67 avg 37.6.

you see a complete different result with real people playing. with 5970 doing almost double the resolution at same similar frame rates.
 
Except they're not doing apple to apple comparisons.. all [H] showed is that you can get higher image quality by running higher AA with a 480 over the 5870 and get the same framerate.

Where you say the 5970 has better resolution look at the AA settings on the two which is also doing very high btw.. only thing doing high is the 470. You can't make any comparisons by [H]'s benchmarks on how the single 480 compares to the 5970.
 
BladeSpirits said:
Except they're not doing apple to apple comparisons.. all [H] showed is that you can get higher image quality by running higher AA with a 480 over the 5870 and get the same framerate.

Where you say the 5970 has better resolution look at the AA settings on the two which is also doing very high btw.. only thing doing high is the 470. You can't make any comparisons by [H]'s benchmarks on how the single 480 compares to the 5970.
Click to expand...

while that might appear true please remember also this other [h] that show there is image quality drops when there is 4x AA and very high is selected. so really it acting more like high well until game dev patch it. which is what i am implying when i said it was working as high. while apples to apples is not available by [h]. Clearly they should have some more than marginal performance gain verses the 480 with almost a drop of almost 1/2 the resolution. Also metro 2033 has already been optimized for the 480 as it TWIMTP games. while ATI now has to release drivers update to optimize the rendering of it.
 
coldstorm said:
while that might appear true please remember also this other [h] that show there is image quality drops when there is 4x AA and very high is selected. so really it acting more like high well until game dev patch it. which is what i am implying when i said it was working as high. while apples to apples is not available by [h]. Clearly they should have some more than marginal performance gain verses the 480 with almost a drop of almost 1/2 the resolution. Also metro 2033 has already been optimized for the 480 as it TWIMTP games. while ATI now has to release drivers update to optimize the rendering of it.
Click to expand...

Actually that says NVidia is effected by AAA.. with 4XMSAA theres no image difference between the 400 and 5000 lines. Then goes on to say both lines are effected by 4XMSAA. So either way 4XMSAA seems to be a better way of comparing both cards atm still making the above benchmark I showed have some merit. And yeh as I said before ATI obviously will get their framerates up more and have the 5970 surpass the 480 at lower resolutions, but that gap in the higher resolutions makes it hard to believe any sort of drivers could close that much.

And atleast according to PC Perspective NVidia holds the only single card (be it dual GPU or not) that can run Metro 2033 with all the bells and whistles on and still have a game that doesn't look like a slideshow.

Anyway the 480 has shown it can compete with even the 5970 if the game is making use of certain features that the NVidia gave up raw pixel pushing power to do other things like geometry tessellation much more efficiently. The majority of games that's obviously not the case atm, but at the same time there is such a thing as overkill and 60+FPS there is just absolutely no way of noticing any difference so your paying more for no real gain. That's all I'm trying to say. ATI's current architecture might of been the first to provide DX11 but hardly do it in an efficient manner. Though really only time will tell if more games come.. I'm guessing NVidia isn't gambling though since their support to developers early on means they can help push games to make use of their card more.
 
BladeSpirits said:
Actually that says NVidia is effected by AAA.. with 4XMSAA theres no image difference between the 400 and 5000 lines. Then goes on to say both lines are effected by 4XMSAA. So either way 4XMSAA seems to be a better way of comparing both cards atm still making the above benchmark I showed have some merit. And yeh as I said before ATI obviously will get their framerates up more and have the 5970 surpass the 480 at lower resolutions, but that gap in the higher resolutions makes it hard to believe any sort of drivers could close that much.

And atleast according to PC Perspective NVidia holds the only single card (be it dual GPU or not) that can run Metro 2033 with all the bells and whistles on and still have a game that doesn't look like a slideshow.

Anyway the 480 has shown it can compete with even the 5970 if the game is making use of certain features that the NVidia gave up raw pixel pushing power to do other things like geometry tessellation much more efficiently. The majority of games that's obviously not the case atm, but at the same time there is such a thing as overkill and 60+FPS there is just absolutely no way of noticing any difference so your paying more for no real gain. That's all I'm trying to say. ATI's current architecture might of been the first to provide DX11 but hardly do it in an efficient manner. Though really only time will tell if more games come.. I'm guessing NVidia isn't gambling though since their support to developers early on means they can help push games to make use of their card more.
Click to expand...

even GTX 480 does better in tessellation but still unplayable in Metro 2033 with DoF on..

in future, more tessellation means nothing right now. not even a GTX 480 can play it smoothly.

its like 8800 GTX, came out with DX10 support, but in actual DX10 games it has no horse power to push it.. until generations later...

same thing apply here with both 5870 and GTX 480. As a early adapter for GTX 480, the only game you can feel its effort will be Metro 2033, nothing else...probably Heaven Benchmark, but its unplayable :p
 
I think the Metro2033 bug is making the HD5870 look bad, whether it's TWIMTBP's fault, or not.

nVidia claims the bug affects the HD5870 at 4xMSAA, but that could be a lie, because:

For all we know, no single card is playable at Very High settings with 4xMSAA (the bug disables VeryHigh on nVidia,) so it is no surprise when HardOCP found it to be unplayable on the HD5870

I tend to believe that the bug is in nVidia's drivers, or the TWITBMP-optimized Cg(?) rendering path

Until the fix, we don't know how the GTX480 will truly do at VeryHigh with 4xMSAA (or with AAA)

All we know at this point is that the HD5870 is currently the only single card capable of displaying Metro2033 at VeryHigh with AAA as the GTX480 does not actually enable this option yet because of this bug
 
While I typically prefer [H]'s qualitative reviews over raw quantitative comparisons, this methodology can be flawed, and I think we have a glaring example of this flaw in the latest review.

[H] concludes that GTX 470 is a waste of money and has no real purpose compared with the competition. It performs on par with the 5850, they argue, and since it costs more and runs hotter, it makes no sense.

Now here's the flaw: since [H] only tests cards at their highest playable resolution, you see the GTX 480 and 5870 usually running at 25x16, whereas you see the GTX 470 and 5850 running at 19x12. For the majority of gamers, who are running at 19x12, this is not necessarily the most useful comparison: it would be far more instructive to see what *all* the cards can do at the same 19x12 setting.

And, as we can see from other reviews, the GTX 470 gives the 5870 close competition at 19x12 resolution. Dollar for dollar, it is a better deal than the 5870 for the vast majority of gamers.

The review also fails to factor in availability: where the hell is the 5850? Nowhere near its MSRP of $260, and almost completely unavailable in its reference form. You can get the gimped, non-reference models (that don't OC well and don't overvolt at all) for $315. And this is six months after the 5850 is released? Unacceptable.

Meanwhile, you can get the GTX 470 at its regular MSRP today.

I'd honestly prefer the 5850 in CF over GTX 470 SLI, but I'm not going to pay inflated prices for 5850s of inferior build quality. And since the GTX 470 is effectively $320 through Bing cashback, I'm at least going try that route first.
 
For Folding@Home, it's my assumption, based on the stream processor count, that the GTX 470 will be an excellent performer from a production/price consideration. I had really hoped that somehow Nvidia would produce the Fermis in quantity so that used market would see a good number of used GTX 295s at reasonable prices. Well, so far, that ain't happening. I'm watching closely.
 
BladeSpirits said:
Agreed, but that 80c is with it running Furmark which is way more demanding on the GPU then any game is. While I doubt it'd be running at 60c or maybe even 70c its hardly the 95c that everyone quotes from reviews if it manually set (at a reasonable noise level) rather then auto controlled.
Click to expand...

Umm, it hits 90s pretty consistently for me under heavy gaming load, not even furmark.
 
Zotac has new card coming with zalman dual fans of course it 3 slot cooler but better overclocking potential on air. Its call zotac gtx 480 amp. Should be out in June or July (in their forums) but looks cool as well. Only problem is tri sli is no longer possible with this amp edition but I think I will go with 2 of these and still have room for one slot phyxs card.
 
While I typically prefer [H]'s qualitative reviews over raw quantitative comparisons, this methodology can be flawed, and I think we have a glaring example of this flaw in the latest review.

[H] concludes that GTX 470 is a waste of money and has no real purpose compared with the competition. It performs on par with the 5850, they argue, and since it costs more and runs hotter, it makes no sense.

Now here's the flaw: since [H] only tests cards at their highest playable resolution, you see the GTX 480 and 5870 usually running at 25x16, whereas you see the GTX 470 and 5850 running at 19x12. For the majority of gamers, who are running at 19x12, this is not necessarily the most useful comparison: it would be far more instructive to see what *all* the cards can do at the same 19x12 setting.
Click to expand...
This. But I've only been saying this kind of thing for about, oh, I don't know, the last 6 months maybe? Why should anybody listen?
 
I didn't have an account here when this article came out, so I have to say it now: the GTX 470 consumes more power than the HD 5870 in a CrossFire config.

The irony...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top