News - NVIDIA gives us a rundown of GeForce GTX 480 (Fermi) features

[HEXUS]

Why the graphics giant believes you should be buying its flagship card on the day of launch.

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[funke_munke]

All well and good but we want hard numbers!

The hair was nice though.

[Fraz]

Agreed - the hair modelling was very nicely done

[GaryRW]

£450? Is it just me or is there just no justification for this at the moment. Where are the games that require the kind of horsepower that a £450 card (hopefully) has? Presumably there's people with 30" monitors that will benefit, but surely they are targeting a tiny proportion of the PC gaming market, let alone the overall gaming market? Obviously the lack of graphically taxing games can't be heaped just on nvidia's shoulders, but it does make me wonder whether TWIMTBP is aimed more at undermining ATI rather than pushing PC gaming forward... I guess Nvidia must be confident of making a lot from the non-graphics market with the CUDA type stuff.

I should say that I'm taking a selfish view here as I can't see the fermi launch benefiting me in the slightest. I can't see it will put any pressure on ATI to reduce their prices on their high range cards, let alone the mid-range stuff that I am more likely to buy. At this rate, I'll probably sit out the current ATI generation and wait for the 6xxx's or possibly the mid-range fermi derivatives, both of which will probably arrive at roughly the same time!

I think it says something that the main reason I want to replace my old 8800gt is to get a card with a quieter fan.

[kalniel]

but surely they are targeting a tiny proportion of the PC gaming market

This - they don't have all that many available to sell (for whatever reason...)

Think of it as a bit like the Intel Extreme edition processors.

[shaithis]

I hope that's not all Fermi has to offer....lol

I can't wait for this to get in the hands of reviewers, hopefully people will hold off on pre-orders until some truly independent reviews have hit the net.

[Bloke]

It will take a lot more than high performance numbers to convince me to go back to nvidia, the Ati 5 series has given nvidia a bloody nose and for a first time for a while thay are playing catch up!

[Bloke]

Plus I bet the drivers will have some issues as I am sure nvidia is chucking this one out asap to claw back the huge amount of sales they have lost in the dx11 race...

[ChuvelxD]

Plus I bet the drivers will have some issues as I am sure nvidia is chucking this one out asap to claw back the huge amount of sales they have lost in the dx11 race...

Right...because drivers have always been the achilles heel of nVidia. No, they are releasing their DX11 card on their terms. Not the terms of ATI enthusiasts.

A report from Fudzilla.com has the GTX 480 running Uniengine, the DX11 benchmark at TWICE the speed of its 5870 competitor.

Nvidia or GTFO

-nVidia Fanboy

[Jimbo75]

Right...because drivers have always been the achilles heel of nVidia. No, they are releasing their DX11 card on their terms. Not the terms of ATI enthusiasts.

A report from Fudzilla.com has the GTX 480 running Uniengine, the DX11 benchmark at TWICE the speed of its 5870 competitor.

Nvidia or GTFO

-nVidia Fanboy

You are one sad delusional individual. On their terms? You mean nVidia chose to release their dx11 card 6 months after the competition has already sold millions of cards?

Please, for the good of humanity, leave the internet.

[Bloke]

Right...because drivers have always been the achilles heel of nVidia. No, they are releasing their DX11 card on their terms. Not the terms of ATI enthusiasts.

A report from Fudzilla.com has the GTX 480 running Uniengine, the DX11 benchmark at TWICE the speed of its 5870 competitor.

Nvidia or GTFO

-nVidia Fanboy

I have owned nothing but Nvidia cards ranging from pre 4 mx series through to the gtx 295 and recently made the switch due to poor driver releases, very poor performance at dx10, continual overpricing and its decision to prolong the release of new cards which will for sure be costly. Nvidia has not met my requirements and probably of other gamers too and when they choose to do so they will lose out, maybe for the time being only.

I go for best performance-price (in that order) and not branding and Ati is ticking all the boxes at the moment especially at dx 10.

[shaithis]

Right...because drivers have always been the achilles heel of nVidia. No, they are releasing their DX11 card on their terms. Not the terms of ATI enthusiasts.

A report from Fudzilla.com has the GTX 480 running Uniengine, the DX11 benchmark at TWICE the speed of its 5870 competitor.

Nvidia or GTFO

-nVidia Fanboy

Oh, a member of "Club Rollo"!

[dangel]

Christ, what's up with the mental nVidia worship? It's utter nonsensical to blindly follow any company and as a consumer the real benefit to us all is competition.

[Bloke]

Indeed.

[Bloke]

It seems my earlier comment about crappy drivers from nvidia lately has been justified with the " how hot can your gpu get without the fan running - 196.75 WHQL driver"..

[sammorris]

£450? Is it just me or is there just no justification for this at the moment. Where are the games that require the kind of horsepower that a £450 card (hopefully) has? Presumably there's people with 30" monitors that will benefit, but surely they are targeting a tiny proportion of the PC gaming market, let alone the overall gaming market? Obviously the lack of graphically taxing games can't be heaped just on nvidia's shoulders, but it does make me wonder whether TWIMTBP is aimed more at undermining ATI rather than pushing PC gaming forward... I guess Nvidia must be confident of making a lot from the non-graphics market with the CUDA type stuff.

This mentality annoys me. I agree entirely with the comment about nvidia doing nothing but undermining the competition (to be fair, they've been doing that for years, even when they were competitive)
but to say there's no need for cards like this? On the contrary, even with 4-GPU SLI or Crossfire systems, even the best cards of this generation are inadequate to run every game that comes out at high spec. This isn't of course the hardware manufacturer's fault (Well, not for the most part - needing to use crossfire to play a game because nvidia crippled its performance, or not being able to use it because the game was coded against it does have some influence here) but that of software devs that decide that with needlessly low-quality textures, absurd lighting and shadow technology should be used to make games run terribly.
Frankly, I'd be happy to play games released today using the same lighting technology as 2004 era games like UT2004 and Doom 3, just with proper high quality textures. You might need a sizeable amount of video memory, but other than that cards like my old X1900 would be sufficient, and on top of that, less time spent on lighting might mean better gameplay etc. etc.
Back to my point, the GTX 480 I am reasonably confident is not going to be trouncing the HD5870, at all. Sure, it will be faster, but I'm inclined to believe the "figures" semiaccurate posted, or at least close to them. I will take "5%" and stretch it to perhaps 15%, then apply the innate advantage nvidia GPUs have in some games. Worst case scenario I think we're looking at 40-50% gain in the most biased games.
So let's add 50% to the frame rate of the HD5870 and see what we come up with:
STALKER Call of Pripyat DirectX11: Minimum 57, Average 71, 1280x1024 (!) 4xAA
Shattered Horizon: Minimum 35, Average 59, 1680x1050
Napoleon: Total War: Minimum 27, Average 48, 1920x1080 2xAA
Battlefield Bad Company 2 DirectX11: Minimum 32, Average 68, 1920x1080 8xAA
Aliens vs Predator: Minimum 62, Average 125, 1920x1080

It's a big if that the GTX480 is 50% above the HD5870. In some of these titles it won't be, as not all of them are nvidia-biased. Napoleon Total War is even ATI-biased. Yet look at these figures. You can forgive a minimum of 27 for NTW as it's a strategy, but a minimum of 32 for battlefield and 35 for shattered horizon? That is not smooth gameplay. It's not bad, but it's not smooth, and while Battlefield is at least running at high-spec, Shattered Horizon is on a small monitor, without even any AA applied.
So this card is unnecessary? Frankly, it's not fast enough, even for a 1920x1200 user who wants fluid gameplay, let alone someone like me who uses 2560x1600 and wants AA to boot.



tl;dr: Those who think cards like the HD5870 and GTX480 are overkill clearly haven't seen any new release benchmarks