Should Nvidia kill the GTX480 and replace it with a 460x2?

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Stoly

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Seeing that a couple of GTX 460 in sli are cheaper, faster, quieter, and consume more or less the same power as the GTX480. Should nvidia release a 460x2 and kill the 480? (and keep it only for HPC).

Stupid me please move to video card section.
 
Not positive about Nvidia, but with ATi you're limited to four GPUs. You can x-fire two 5970s, but cannot tri-fire three 5970s.

So, could you only SLI two 460x2s?

Tri-SLI people would be screwed?
 
Tolyngee said:
Not positive about Nvidia, but with ATi you're limited to four GPUs. You can x-fire two 5970s, but cannot tri-fire three 5970s.

So, could you only SLI two 460x2s?

Tri-SLI people would be screwed?
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AFAIK SLI/x-fire tops at 4gpus
 
ya, take away the single fastest GPU and bring us the mico-stutter machine...why would you want to do that? lmao.
 
Why is this in OS thread?

Anyways, no they shouldn't. Some people prefer a faster single GPU over SLI. There are issues where SLI doesn't perform as it should or even at all in some games. A lot of older games it doesn't work well in at all (stuff that old I used to just run on 1 GPU anyways). Single GPU is still the champion and will be until all developers 100% support SLI with their coding.
 
bigdogchris said:
Why is this in OS thread?

Anyways, no they shouldn't. Some people prefer a faster single GPU over SLI. There are issues where SLI doesn't perform as it should or even at all in some games. A lot of older games it doesn't work well in at all (stuff that old I used to just run on 1 GPU anyways). Single GPU is still the champion and will be until all developers 100% support SLI with their coding.
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Well SLI has evolved a lot since its early days. Most popular games support it and the ones that just won't work don't really need it anyway.

The G100 is a behemoth of a chip, very expensive, consumes lots of power and generates enough heat to keep you during a cold winter. Plus it doesn't even have all its cuda cores enabled.

A GTX 460 x2 would probably address mosts of the issues and be faster, plus you could get nvsurround in a single card.

That would fill the gap until a newer G10x with a smaller process and tweaked for gaming comes out.
 
Stoly said:
Well SLI has evolved a lot since its early days. Most popular games support it and the ones that just won't work don't really need it anyway.
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True. However, scaling varies from title to title and if you hang out in the Video Cards subforum you'll see quite a few people dumping SLI/CF setups to go back to a single card because the actual gameplay experience is smoother despite having less FPS. It's really a matter of personal preference and what you're willing to tolerate when it comes to your gaming experience.

Stoly said:
The G100 is a behemoth of a chip, very expensive, consumes lots of power and generates enough heat to keep you during a cold winter.
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That's not a bad thing in the winter, though. Saves on the heat pump costs. :D

Stoly said:
A GTX 460 x2 would probably address mosts of the issues and be faster, plus you could get nvsurround in a single card.
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Now that would be cool. I do like that idea, but would nVidia make that possible or would you still have to have two physical cards?
 
The 480 is still the fastest SINGLE GPU in the market right now despite the heat, power and noise issues. Two 480s will beat 4 460s in most cases as 4× scaling isn't all that great.
 
heatlesssun said:
Two 480s will beat 4 460s in most cases as 4× scaling isn't all that great.
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+1

GTX 480 SLI would destroy GTX 460 Quad SLI, it wouldn't even be a fair fight. Triple scaling is pretty bad, and quad scaling is fairly terrible.
 
kllrnohj said:
+1

GTX 480 SLI would destroy GTX 460 Quad SLI, it wouldn't even be a fair fight. Triple scaling is pretty bad, and quad scaling is fairly terrible.
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Agreed. I am curious and I've not seen numbers on this just a guess on my part, is 3x scaling in Surround decent? I mean three screens three cards right? I would think that there's something efficient about that.
 
heatlesssun said:
Agreed. I am curious and I've not seen numbers on this just a guess on my part, is 3x scaling in Surround decent? I mean three screens three cards right? I would think that there's something efficient about that.
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No. It is only one "screen" to the game and DirectX, and you still get the same AFR and SFR modes. Surround doesn't change any of that.
 
kllrnohj said:
No. It is only one "screen" to the game and DirectX, and you still get the same AFR and SFR modes. Surround doesn't change any of that.
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I understand that. What I'm saying is with 2x SLI you plug two monitors into one card and one into the second and with 3x you can only plug one monitor into each card for Surround, you can't plug two monitors into one card if you have 3x SLI. Three cards with each driving a single display, there must be some efficiency or reason why you have to do it that way. I have no idea, I need to look into it more but there's something a little different going on there obviosuly between 2x and 3x.
 
I say bring out a GTX485 and GTX475 that is made like the GTX460 and slowly phase out the 480, 470 and 465. If those cards are as good as the 460, theyd be faster than the ones theyd replace and theyd do away with the power and heat concerns.
 
Yeah, quad scaling SLI is bad, last I heard it was around 20% efficiency of the fourth card.
 
The GTX 460 SLI and GTX 480 will most likely coexist in the top end together, as the GTX 480 will fill the shoes of non SLI-capable rigs (like why isn't SLI available on AMD platforms?) as well as anyone who wants more performance (SLI GTX 480?)
 
Should Nvidia have killed the 285 after they released the 295? What kind of question is this? Single gpu and dual gpu products are completely different animals. ATI didn't kill the 5870 after the 5970 came out either. That doesn't make sense from either a practical or business point of view.
 
IMO, it is inevitable that we will see a 460x2. There will be a little time before that happens, sure, but it must be in the pipe. It's so cool running, consumes a reasonable amount of power, and it supports SLI. What else do you need?

Here's to hoping a 460x2 will run $450. *tink*

BTW, that will never be a replacement for a GTX 480. The chip just doesn't have the bandwidth.
 
heatlesssun said:
I understand that. What I'm saying is with 2x SLI you plug two monitors into one card and one into the second and with 3x you can only plug one monitor into each card for Surround, you can't plug two monitors into one card if you have 3x SLI. Three cards with each driving a single display, there must be some efficiency or reason why you have to do it that way. I have no idea, I need to look into it more but there's something a little different going on there obviosuly between 2x and 3x.
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Well, maybe

In Tri-SLI Surround AFR, this happens:
Frame 1) Card A sends card B 1 monitor image (for 3rd monitor)
Frame 2) Card B sends card A 2 monitor images (for 1st and 2nd monitor)
Frame 3) Card C sends card A 2 monitor images, and card B 1 monitor image

Which results in 6 monitor images being sent over a 3 frame period. If you change it so that instead each card has an output, you get this:
Frame 1) Card A sends card B 1 monitor image, and card C 1 monitor image
Frame 2) Card B sends card A 1 monitor image, and card C 1 monitor image
Frame 3) Card C sends card A 1 monitor image, and card B 1 monitor image

Which is still 6 monitor images across the same 3 frame period, but the load is more consistent.

That said, a quick google on the topic reveals that tri-SLI Surround is currently useless: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=172712

i can confirm that there is no performance increase going from sli 480s to 3-way SLI 480s. The compatibility is working with 3-way SLI, but no extra fps.
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Is anyone here running triple SLI able to confirm/deny?
 
kllrnohj said:
Is anyone here running triple SLI able to confirm/deny?
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I would say its true as I don't see any gains when comparing my scores to 2x systems. Actually what I have noticed is a cap, nothing over 142 FPS with Surround. Something else is a little odd too, I don't seem to be able to dedicate one of the cards to PhysX while running Surround which I thought the option to do so was in the first beta driver. And then there's this thing that I heard about from the PC Perspective review called Auxilary Display that's supposed to allow you to run a Surround display PLUS another monitor for a total of four but I can't seem to figure that out. I can however run 6 displays as singles, just tested tonight.

I need to reconfigure to 2x SLI + PhysX with the bridge and try that out.
 
heatlesssun said:
I would say its true as I don't see any gains when comparing my scores to 2x systems. Actually what I have noticed is a cap, nothing over 142 FPS with Surround.
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http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-480-3way-sli-review/13

That is one MASSIVE CPU bottleneck for the 3-way setup, it's even slower than 2-way due to two things. The first fact is that 3 cards eats more CPU cycles than 2-way SLI setups and that thus can have an adverse effect on CPU limited games. The second is that in 3-way SLI mode the PCI-Express configuration kicks back to x8 mode instead of the x16 mode in 2-way SLI. With both factors weighed in, it can slow down the 3-way SLI setup.
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Are you just running into a combination of both factors?
 
kllrnohj said:
That said, a quick google on the topic reveals that tri-SLI Surround is currently useless: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=172712



Is anyone here running triple SLI able to confirm/deny?
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Okay, just did some testing with Batman AA and at least in the 3D Surround test I ran this is fortunately not true at all. 100% scaling when going from 2 to 3 cards! Average frame rate with 2 cards was 39 FPS and with 3 it went to 58! I switched between 2 and 3 cards twice running the benchmark twice and got the same results each time. Impressive.

PhysX and 3D at 5760 x 1080 is the most resource intensive thing out there, it's simply killing performance. What was intresting there is that 2x SLI + PhysX yielded the same results as 3x SLI so it looks like with 3 cards the driver actually honors dedicating one card to PhysX if you choose one in the SLI settings. What's odd there is that the checkbox to dedicate a card to PhysX is disabled even though the drop down list to pick a card works. So that might be a little confusion in the UI, if you pick a card it just dedicates to PhysX and the checkbox is redundant.

Obviously need to test a lot more and I'm sure that not everything will scale at 100% but I'd say that 3x scaling isn't inherently broken, at least in 3D.
 
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So going back and checking out a few thing in 2D, yeah no scaling beyond 2 cards, not that anything needed it that I cheeked out.

So quick conclusion 3D is very demanding and can use a third card. 2D looks to be capped for me, and I have no idea why.
 
vjcsmoke said:
Should Nvidia have killed the 285 after they released the 295? What kind of question is this? Single gpu and dual gpu products are completely different animals. ATI didn't kill the 5870 after the 5970 came out either. That doesn't make sense from either a practical or business point of view.
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Was the GTX295 cheaper, drawed less power and was less noisy then the GTX285?

ATI didn't kill the 5870 because its the SAME F*KN GPU as the 5970. And again the 5970 is more expensive, draws a lot of power and is noisier than the 5870.
 
no reason to eliminate the 480GTX. what if someone wants to do SLI or tri-SLI 480s for extreme performance?

that said, why bother with a 460x2 when you can just SLI two 460s? i guess for those people who only have one pci-e x16 slot?
 
heatlesssun said:
So going back and checking out a few thing in 2D, yeah no scaling beyond 2 cards, not that anything needed it that I cheeked out.

So quick conclusion 3D is very demanding and can use a third card. 2D looks to be capped for me, and I have no idea why.
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What about Metro 2033 or BFBC2 or even Crysis? Could you post some numbers of 2x vs. 3x in 2D and 3D?
 
Yeah, I'm working on putting together a post on this and I'll test these:

Batman AA
Metro 2033
BFBC2
Just Cause 2
Crysis

These titles are all 3D Vison Ready with the exception of Crysis. Might throw in another non-3D Vision title or two just to see if there's anything going on there.

I ran through a couple of quick tests in 2D Surround from Portal, Couterstrike Source, Dirt 2, Batman AA, and yes, 142 is the cap, I've seen that number pop out in somebenchmarks elsewhere, can't recall, but there is something about that number. However I have heard of plenty of people break 142 in older games like HL2 with 2D Surround with 2 480s so that's puzzling but I've not tested 2x 2D Surround.

Good grief so many damned options! Unfortunately I think the days of real comprehensive benchmarking my be done, simply to many combinations to test!
 
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