Manufacturer: Nvidia Price: $ 499 US Author: Steve Date: 03/24/2010

[ Introduction ]

Finally after a very long wait Nvidia is today launching their new GeForce GTX 400 series, with the introduction of the GeForce GTX 480 and 470 graphics cards. The big question now is after having waited so long, is Nvidia’s latest GPU architecture all it’s cracked up to be? The AMD damage control team is working overtime right now and for good reason, Nvidia are finally launching their new Fermi architecture today, said to be far more powerful and complex than the AMD Evergreen architecture that the Radeon HD 5000 series is based on. Although there has been a lot of controversy surrounding the Fermi architecture, with many claiming that it is already a flop due to various rumored reasons, Nvidia is clearly confident with the product that they have come up with. The first set of slides in our media kit says it all really, “GeForce GTX 480 – Fastest GPU in the World”, and if Nvidia’s own internal testing is anything to go by then yes it certainly is. However late last year AMD claimed that they would not forfeit the performance crown in 2010, which it would seem was a bold statement. This makes us wonder what AMD has ready to counter the new GeForce GTX 480/GTX 470 threats, as it is going to take more than a few driver tweaks. Whatever AMD might be cooking up, they are going to go down the driver optimization path first. Just a few days ago AMD provided us with the Catalyst 10.3a driver featuring a number of performance improvements of up to 5% for the Radeon HD 5000 and 4800 series graphics cards. AMD was also quick to note that they have not exhausted all possible performance improvements and that we can expect more in the near future. In the meantime the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470 graphics cards have landed, with quite a lot of impact we might add. Although the new GeForce GTX 400 series graphics cards are playing a serious game of catch up, we feel with the pricing strategy that Nvidia has employed they will be welcomed with open arms by many gamers. Back in mid-2008 when Nvidia launched the first GT200 based graphics cards, the GeForce GTX 280/GTX 260, they were released with price tags of $649 US and $399 US. Just months later pricing was reduced heavily to counter the more affordable Radeon HD 4800 series. Shafting early adopters, Nvidia quickly reduced pricing to $449 US for the GeForce GTX 280 and between $299 - $339 US for the GeForce GTX 260. This time round Nvidia faces a very different and far more difficult situation. This time it was AMD/ATI who threw the first punch, and they did so well in advance. With the Radeon HD 5870 currently available in numbers for around $420 US, asking significantly more than this for the GeForce GTX 480 would not be a wise choice. Therefore Nvidia is starting the GeForce GTX 480 at a more reasonable $499 US, while the GeForce GTX 470 carries an MSRP of $349 US, making it only a fraction more expensive than the Radeon HD 5850. The pricing appears more reasonable than what we have come to expect from Nvidia, but how do these new graphics cards perform? After all, this will determine their real value. While we do plan to throw the GeForce GTX 480 through a battery of tests, before we do let's quickly take a more in-depth look at the specifications.

Table of Contents >>> Introduction <<< GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 Details Test System Specs & 3Dmark Vantage Test: Batman Arkham Asylum, Battlefield Bad Company 2 Test: Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, Company of Heroes Test: Crysis Warhead, Dawn of War II Test: Far Cry 2, Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X Test: Metro 2033, Resident Evil 5 Test: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, World in Conflict Test: Wolfenstein Power Consumption & Temperatures Conclusion Next Page ->

ProX	Posted on: 03/26/2010 10:19 PM Awesome review but shame about the GeForce GTX 480, its a hot dog!

Renegade

Posted on: 03/26/2010 10:26 PM wow thank you ever much for the late night reading. what an honest review but you could have made it much shorter and just said that fermi blows LOL

Rizz	Posted on: 03/26/2010 10:28 PM The power usage is shocking you need your own power plant to run this. Anyway thanks for review.

gamer007

Posted on: 03/26/2010 10:33 PM lol I thought this thing was meant to be a killer. it is slower than my old GeForce GTX 295 in Metro 2033 which is a game I read it would do very well in. I am massively disappointed in this release.

FULMTL

Posted on: 03/27/2010 02:02 AM look at those 2x 5770's go! Save $100 and some power. The crossfire 5770's seem plenty fine.

Horribleron Posts: 13 Joined: 2010-03-26

Posted on: 03/27/2010 03:48 AM Since I'm trying to cut back on my power bill (check out my new Energy Star rated fridge!) I doubt this beast will find its way into my rig. But, it's good to see ATI get some competition so hopefully ATI prices will drop a bit. Hey Steve, what happened to my account? I had to recreate it. I thought that I had just lost the password during my switch to WIN7 but somebody there flushed it. Horribleron

Buuzzza

Posted on: 03/27/2010 06:56 AM poor Fermi this is nothing like what I was expecting. I will be keeping my old Radeon HD 4870 X2 for a little longer. Well at least until the 5870 pricing drops. If that even happens now!

Zerg	Posted on: 03/29/2010 12:40 AM 2 little 2 late I guess. Great review and I loved your comments about the power consumption

billtiger

Posted on: 03/29/2010 10:44 AM So late, so hot, so hungry, its a shame on nvidia, i'll keep my good watercooled 4870x2, and when prices will drop a bit, i'll change for 5850 crossfire

tiger

Posted on: 03/29/2010 08:05 PM Great review! Makes me wonder if I should move back to ATI. After all I dont't own a power plant and I really don't want to grill my MOBO and RAM. Shame on you NVIDIA for blowing such a kick ass product ;-(

Horribleron Posts: 13 Joined: 2010-03-26

Posted on: 03/30/2010 01:36 AM If what I have been reading on SemiAccurate is true we may not be seeing very many of these GTX480/470 cards. Basically, NVidia wanted Fermi to run at 750 Mhz with all 512 CUDA cores. It missed that mark badly. 480 cores at 700 Mhz is the best it could muster and have enough chips to sell and that's only after they upped the voltage. So pretty much all of the boards they will be selling have flawed GPU's. This mess is pretty much a money losing proposition for NVidia. Their best hope is a healthy GF104 with 256 cores at a decent clock rate and good yields sometime in May or June. Even if the GTX480 does beat the ATI 5870 it doesn't beat enough to justify the price difference (especially if ATI lowers prices in the future) plus I don't care to buy a flawed product or one that may not be around very long. The boys in green really need to rethink this business model of building stuff just fast enough to beat the competition in benchmarks but where they lose their shorts in profitability. I can guarantee you that the boys in red aren't losing money right now.

Ruzveh

Posted on: 04/01/2010 03:47 AM Whooaaaa! I m totally turned off with nVidia marketing strategies and all fake stories they made initially before the launch of this fermi based cards. M sure all nvidia fans will not start looking at ATi cards for their superior and first to launch Dx11 based cards. Ati cards r latest, more efficient and less priced. Atleast they hav not cheated like nvidia. Imagine how much time they wasted in making a dummy card like fermi? And they shamefully priced higher then the better cards which are available in the market. Who the hell now wants these Dx11 cards by nvidia. My advise to XFX "Good for the first time u made a smart decision to produce Ati cards and selling it" We are with u. Finally waiting so much for nvidia i have decided to go for ATI card who r winner at the moment. Nvidia it was a v bad strategy by you of keep waiting for ur products & then spurt all at one to boost initial sale because u knw from the back of ur mind that ur cards r not efficient. They r not fastest as u thought it to be. TATA nVidia.. Welcome ATI

Artem

Posted on: 04/01/2010 04:50 AM Epic Fail

QmA

Posted on: 04/01/2010 07:33 PM Are you guys serious? I don't see how the 480 was a big failure. Its the fastest single GPU card! It deserves some respect for that alone. We have some excellent cards from ATi but frankly I don't know what they were smoking when they came out with those ridiculous prices. Lets keep the fan-boy crap out of the picture and see what we have. Nvidia has given us what we desperately needed and that is competition! We expected the 480 to compete with the 5870 and it does just that and it does that well. The 470 also competes very well to the 5850 and downright beats it for price/performance. I probably won't buy the Nvidia cards but to call them a failure is really stupid. Thanks for the review STEvE.

Dubs	Posted on: 04/01/2010 08:34 PM I agree with QmA its not that bad and I think the reviewer was smart to reserve his ultimate opinion on Fermi until production cards ship and drivers mature a little more.

Horribleron Posts: 13 Joined: 2010-03-26

Posted on: 04/02/2010 02:23 AM I understand how you feel QmA and even agree that it's good to have some competition to drive prices down. And if NVidia wants to to lose money to provide me with a kick ass card who am I as the consumer to complain? It is a decent performing card but falls far short of what it was supposed to be. According to SemiAccurate, NVidia ordered 9000 wafers with 104 chips per wafer of the A3 spin and got roughly 30,000 working parts. That means out of 936,000 GPU's they only got 3% to work? Ouch! Apparently the only way to fix this is to do a new base level respin with a B series to correct the problems. This would take six months or more. But still, A fixed Fermi with all 512 cores working at 750 MHz would be a real 5870 killer and likely compete with ATI next refresh as well. And they could have it out by Christmas. This seems to me a base level respin is the only way to deal with the mess. And I DO hope they fix it but I just can't see NVidia continuing on with the A3 GPU in its current state. It's all crazy man. Of coarse, all the information I have read could be wrong and maybe everything is peachy at the fabs. But then they were 6 months late, 32 cuda cores short and 50 Mhz less than what they said would be released. And they also have a card that runs only 10C below the temp where it fails. My cat used to like to sit behind my computer back when was using my 2900XT. I'll bet she would love a Fermi.

Artem

Posted on: 04/02/2010 05:28 AM well why not fail? green guys promised super gpu that'll kill ati's for far its not very killing, it need huge amount of power, and you can toast toasts on it, and with closed pc case you can probably make a grill inside the pc case of cource its price is lower, they have no choise if they want to have a chance vs ati cards so far green cards are piece of crap they need do more research/tuning b4 releasing something worthy

leexgx Posts: 9 Joined: 2010-03-29 Location: UK

Posted on: 04/05/2010 12:53 AM do not think its an big fail just its quite hot and maybe bit noisy in an warm places or in SLI 2x 5870 in CF look very good to me but drivers that really put me off i most likely only get an (i am buying) GTX480 as it should be 3-4x faster then an 9800GX2 (i had the GTX280 games ran mostly smooth but that died on me but i did get credit for it so only need to pay half for the GTX480) other site need to do test with lower cards to see if the GTX295 is really faster then 1 GXT480

Casecutter

Posted on: 04/08/2010 04:13 PM Well most interesting... I notice there’s no power consumption or heat number for the 5770 C-F set-up, what up with that?

Hero	Posted on: 04/08/2010 10:17 PM I am looking forward to your follow articles on some production cards.

sertz

Posted on: 05/21/2010 12:55 PM First off, Ruzveh, go to school for a few more years or something... You are almost completely illiterate. As for the Fermi cards, I actually think this is excellent performance for the price. You have a card that, at times, gives the Radeon HD 5970 a run for its money in a single-GPU solution. Another point is the minimum framerate department. This particular review doesn't reveal minimums, but the minimum framerate in most games is doubled on the GTX 480 over the HD 5870, even though the average frames per second may be similar. The power consumption shouldn't be a surprise to any PC gamer. If ATI hadn't released the Evergreen to be so power efficient, Fermi's release would be the gaming equivelant of the second coming. However, seeing as most people were impatient and bought an HD 5870 before Fermi came out, they will defend their purchase to the death... Even if it is the lesser performing card. I am one of the few who actually sold my HD 5870 and used the money towards a new GTX 480 and couldn't be happier with the change. The drivers are much less buggy that the catalyst drivers (even though ATI has done great things recently with their drivers), all of my games have seen performance improvements, and the card is an absolute beast at tesselation. Another, less talked about fact is the framebuffer. While not important now, the extra bit of memory will become very important with next gen PC games releasing. My HD 5870 had 1GB memory, and while it served me well in most games, in GTA IV I was unable to max the settings out (even with the -nomemrestriction command) because the game became completely unplayable. Whereas with my GTX 480, I can completely max out the game without a problem because of the exra memory on the card. I'm sure the 2GB eyefinity edition Radeon wouldn't have an issue either, but I'm just pointing out one of my observations with the new GTX 480. All in all, to call Fermi a failure would be only to deny the fact that it's the fastest single-gpu card available. And with all the evidence out there showing it is a powerhouse, I think it's safe to say Fermi, while late and power hungry, delivered on the promises nVIDIA made about performance and potential in DX11 titles.

Bob

Posted on: 05/08/2011 12:20 PM I bought the Geforce GTX 480/470 around $500 last year...I run Flight Simulator, Rex 2 weather, and FScommander full blast which is fantastic...However, like someone said it gets very, very HOT...I think it might be on it's last stages out...sorry to say...Don't recommend due to the heat...It's a blast furnace...