SNEAK PEAK: Something new and powerful

There's something new and powerful being announced today. A few more hours, and you will know:

Oh, it's the 26th already? ...Interesting, they have heatpipes.

Not sure who trusts what around here but reviews are up.. here's kyle's at [H]ardforum.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/03/26/nvidia_fermi_gtx_470_480_sli_review

I do have to say, these are next-gen cards. They dominate at the future of gaming. When you are making an investment in a new system, you want the next-gen titles to be realistic and fluid-smooth. This is where these cards come in (assuming tessellation becomes a major part of next-gen titles, and I hope it does as it makes the gaming experience more realistic).

Edited by Alex - 26 Mar 2010 at 7:39pm

These are indeed next gen cards. Everybody is entitled to read through various reviews that will come out and make the decision to purchase the video card that best suits their needs.

You can spin it however you like for the customers here but I read the hardocp article already and much like them the performance of the GTX 480 in comparison to the 5870 is not worth the trade off in my opinion. That may not be the case for everybody. To each their own. I'm sure DigitalStorm will sell plenty of systems with GTX480's and GTX470's in them as soon as their available.

for a difference of a $100 here and for the avarage user its well worth it, when the 2GB version of 5870 comes out, the price difference is gonna be even less and the perfomrance will not change much for most games, for games like gta4 it will make a good difference tho.

The HardOCP review actually had the 5850 beating the GTX470 or being equal with it in every benchmark they did. It cost less, used less power, and ran cooler. Obviously more reviews will come out in the coming weeks prior to the cards being available.

what every game, they did not do most of the popular games, hardocp did only 4 games, these other reviews have done 10 or more games.

also the 5850 was not beating the 470 at hardocp:

metro the 470 did better:



that leaves us with only 3 games, the next one, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the 470 is at 16x csaa and the 5850 is at 12x cfaa. so of course the ati will have a bit better numbers:



that leaves us with 2 more games, the first game with even settings the 470 won, the second game settings are not even.

next game is Aliens vs. Predator here they show the 5850 beating the 470 but if you read the article they could not turn on aa because teh 5850 could not handle it, so with aa the 470 wins.

last game they did was dirt2 and the 5850 beat the 470 with 1 fps.:




so to recap, only 4 games from hardocp, one game 470 one, one game the settings were not even, one game the 5850 could not do aa and last game the 5850 beat the 470 by one 1 fps.

as more reviews come out you will see more and more results like the ones I have posted from driveheaven and gruru3d.


as guru3d is showing with 8xaa and 16x af, the 470 kicking the 5850's butt and giving almost the same performance as the 5870, thats a best band for the buck if you ask me.

Edited by DST4ME - 26 Mar 2010 at 8:20pm

Originally posted by Invader Mig the Radeon HD 5850 is clearly providing more performance. It sadly wasn’t enough to enable 2X AA though at this resolution.

I don't know, maybe I'm reading it wrong.

"We found that both video cards were playable at 2560x1600, but without AA." I think you are reading it wrong.

In any case, the 480 seems to have some pretty damn good performance over the 5870 in some games. Other games it's pretty close. $500 is actually alot cheaper than I thought it would be, so hopefully ATI is going drop prices. I agree with the Guru point that the 470 is the sweet spot. $500 for the 480 is still a bit too much for the gains.

"In fact we have a gut feeling that NVIDIA we reprogram the FAN RPM delta real soon, forcing the fan speed RPM at 70% which was not even every noisy, pushed the temperatures back to 80 Degrees C real quickly."

70% fan speed to keep the card at 80c. Man that is a HOT card. Companies better start making versions with beefier cooling from the start. The reference design doesn't seem to get the job done.

Edited by Invader Mig - 26 Mar 2010 at 9:10pm

Well to be fair Nvidia has always crushed Ati in Far Cry so that's no surprise. I was a bit taken back by the COD WAW results as they were so different from the newer COD MW2. I thought both games were using the same engine and in MW2 the 5850 wins and the 5870 about 15fps behind. That would seem big if they weren't both playing well above 100fps. In WAW ati gets crushed.

Interestingly enough Nvidia isn't showing huge gains over ATI in the DX11 games tested except Metro 2033. When comparing they show the 480 in the lead with 5 frames, but then they show different modes of AAA with the 480. The normal mode boosts the performance significantly, but it doesn't give any information on what settings are used on the 5870.

In battlefield there is little to no difference depending on the resolution. Same goes for Dirt, but ATI made sure they were optimized for Dirt 2.

I'm not sure where you came up with the idea that if a card gets beat in Far Cry that's an indication that it'll get beat in most other games. Just look at the Guru review. There are a few games there where the 480 is neck and neck with the 5870, those include the DX11 titles. Obviously there will be improvements when nvidia comes out with new drivers, but after all this time Nvidia should be crushing ATI. There's no excuse for having the same performance as the 5870 in any game, especially in DX11 titles where nvidia is supposed to shine.

Edited by Invader Mig - 26 Mar 2010 at 9:47pm

Originally posted by <8) slunK parade i havnt rly been keeping up on nvidia, so is the 480 a competitor to the 5870 and 470 to the 5850?if so whats nvidias competitor to the 5970

More often than not the 480 beats the 5870, the same goes for the 470, according to the reviews out so far. The thing is, it all depends on the game. In some games Nvidia really pulls ahead, in other games they are very close. Interestingly enough like I said in my last post, the games that they are close in include DX11 titles.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-470-480-review/

Edited by Invader Mig - 26 Mar 2010 at 9:56pm

the 480 was suppose to be competing with the 5870 but it looks more like its competing with the 5970.

the 470 is suppose to compete with the 5870, but its performance is a couple fps behind 5870.

After reading through all of the reviews it's interesting to watch how much skewed some of the benchmarks from one site to another.

It seems that the 5870 and 5850 show much closer results to the 470/480 when graphics are set to medium/high, but as soon as you crank graphics to max along with AA/AF the numbers clearly swing in Fermi's favor.  Really though... who buys a 500$ GPU to play games on lower than max settings.

Quite a few of the benchmarks posted here look quite bias to me, almost cherry picked to make ATI look its worst.  The Left for Dead benchmarks @ 32AA are especially broken.  Can even 10% of people see the difference between 8 and 32AA at 2560x1600?



If you want to look at numbers rather than specific specially selected fan boy benchmarks I'd recommend instead looking at the overall performance average across all benchmarks.  Do that and you'll see the 480 with a 10-15% performance lead over the 5870, along with a demanding lead in tessellation processing.  Looking at the 470 vs 5850 you'll see anywhere a 2-8% performance difference(in Nvidia's favor) across all games in and resolutions.  Finally the 5870 leads the 470 by around 10-15%. 

After you do that think about how many games will use a DX11 engine in the next year and how big of an impact tessellation will be playing and make your decision.

The 480 can definitely pull out some impressive numbers especially in SLI when AA is cranked to max, but I see heat and power being a real issue, 851W in SLI under load, ouch.

Another cost factor you might consider is power, I'd expect to see 100$ a year or more jump depending on where you live if you keep your machine on 24/7 when upgrading from a 5870 to a 480gtx. Consider this before buying.






Edited by Herniter - 26 Mar 2010 at 10:30pm

I find guru3d more creditable then anadtech.

they always use the latest stable but I'm not sure.

the temps and power consumptions are not much different from a 5970 and I'm not surprised, the performance is also close to 5970 but this is in a one card solution instead of a dual gpu card in internal cf.

looking at overall is ok but its not fair to some games and people that mainly play those games or games like it.

Edited by DST4ME - 26 Mar 2010 at 10:36pm

if you want to go by that reasoning then tomshardware has more traffic then anandtech, but so what.

from my experience based on the way they setup their test systems and etc, in the past, guru3d is more close the the setup we all get, instead of using lower speed ram or not the right amount and etc.



Edited by DST4ME - 26 Mar 2010 at 10:50pm

GTX 480: 10%-15% more performance than a 5870 for a power consumption close to a 5970, at much higher temperatures, and for 100$ more. What has Nvidia been doing these last 6 months? Have they learned nothing?

Edited by Sneakerz - 26 Mar 2010 at 11:05pm