Re: News - NVIDIA benchmarks GeForce GTX 480 against AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870
its their new way to stop overclockers as well... 300W is the max before you are out of spec. This means if you overclock it and kill it or your motherboard, you are screwed for getting any replacements as you ran it out of spec.
And hell... 300w? seriously... just... wow.
Re: News - NVIDIA benchmarks GeForce GTX 480 against AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870
Quote:
Originally Posted by
mikemikemi
Obviously they would never pick something which makes Fermi suck, but surely they would pick a benchmark which gives them a better edge? Strange................
Out of all the benchmarks available, they choose just one. My spidey senses are tingling!
Re: News - NVIDIA benchmarks GeForce GTX 480 against AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870
Quote:
Originally Posted by
TooNice
How much faster is the 5970 over the 5870?
Depending on game, resolution and settings, 30% - 50% (based on Hexus's review). Although that's average frame rates: it'd take quite a bit more research than I'm willing to do to find out about minimum framerates (which seems to be Fermi's strong point, from that slide).
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Terbinator
... isn't fastest card the 5870X2 ?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Domestic_Ginger
One problem; the 5870x2 is not availabale yet and only specs and details have been leaked...
Depends what you mean by 5870 X2 ;) The 5970 2GB is currently the fastest card at retail and is, as mentioned above, a fair bit faster than a 5870, but is only clocked at a 5850 matching 725MHz core / 1000MHz memory. A 5970 4GB has been extensively shown at CeBIT, is being called a 5870 X2 by *some* manufacturers, and runs at the same 850MHz core / 1200MHz memory as a single 5870. That's roughly a 20% boost on both clocks, and should make it significantly faster. A quick search of Hexus's CeBIT coverage should uncover cards from *at least* ASUS (ROG Ares), Sapphire, and XFX that are in, or close to, production. There's even a fairly lengthy interview with Bill from Sapphire about the card. So I'd hardly says "only specs and details have been leaked" - the details have come straight from the manufacturers building the cards...
Re: News - NVIDIA benchmarks GeForce GTX 480 against AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870
Yeah I just assumed everyone else was up too scratch as well ^_^ Mind you, I prefer the "X2" add-on myself, probably one of the only product branding schemes that makes sense but even in this case it isn't directly coming from ATi is it ?
Re: News - NVIDIA benchmarks GeForce GTX 480 against AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870
Considering this is straight from the horse's mouth, this is a surprisingly honest test. It highlights the two things that are both fundamentally important, and that I was expecting. If you look at the sections outlined as not using tesselation, the performance of the HD5870 and GTX480 is fundamentally identical, there's about a 5% gap. This is how current DX11 titles perform, apparently even with tesselation features enabled, though I'm sure we'll see more on that in the future.
The rest of Unigine is a proper hardware tesselation benchmark. As far as I can see, it is a technological stress test to the extent that the tesselation performance is absolutely maximised. Given the GTX480's advantage in tesselation, it performs as expected. What's next is critical - how much of this tesselation demand will games use? I do have my suspicions that games will never use tesselation anywhere near as well as the Unigine demo in practical situations from a performance perspective, and the GTX480 relies on this to gain a performance advantage.
I am also of course interested to see how Catalyst 10.3 will up the HD5870's tesselation performance.
Quite frankly, I think the GTX480 already needs a refresh before it's even come out to cut its TDP down to HD5870 levels, or at least slightly higher (even GTX280 levels I would accept) because as it stands, the performance of the GTX480 in real world games is such that you will need at least two, perhaps three of them to run full 2560x1600 games well on high detail, in much the same way as you need two or three HD5870s to do the same. Difference is, two HD5970s can be used and then overclocked on the limits of an 850W PSU, with four PCIe power connectors. To run three GTX480s, it's going to take the best of the 1200+ watt 6-connector units, and nothing short of a retrofitted full tower case with vast amounts of airflow. Very few gamers are going to tick all these boxes just to take on the Radeon systems, let alone beat them, all for the sake of maybe better tesselation performance. It's not even a dead-cert.
ATI could have done with a bit of a 'comeuppance' to cut the cost of their DX11 hardware, primarily the top-end, HD5870 and above. Based on the performance and expected price of these cards though, I have no expectations that this will happen. Looks like I'm saving up the full £825 for a 4GB HD5970. I was hoping to buy two until I saw the price tag.
Re: News - NVIDIA benchmarks GeForce GTX 480 against AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870
To be honest you could by 2x5870 cards and have change out of £825.
If this full fat 5970 is £825 they are going for an extremely small part of the games market with that cost. Real crying shame since I was looking to it as an upgrade to my 4870x2, but not at that price.
Worst is that Nvidia isn't looking great and Intel died a death.
Anyone a bit worried about the GFX market at the minute? I dont think it looks very healthy.
Re: News - NVIDIA benchmarks GeForce GTX 480 against AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870
I share your concern. nvidia have completely lost the plot IMO. While the GTX400 series is not so bad that nobody will buy them, it's a vastly inferior product at a higher price tag.
I also agree on the pair of 5870s. In their defense, while two HD5870s are a full £175 less, the two HD5870s that you're getting are 2GB versions, which will prove handy for 2560x1600 with Anti-Aliasing, or for playing GTA4, with its uncompressed textures :S
Given the outrageous cost of these new cards, I did some maths.
I paid £540 in total for my current pair of 4870X2s, back in 2008. I got quite lucky to find them cheaper than usual on ebay, but nonetheless, they were the new card that was top of the line then, there was no GTX295.
Compare this to the 4GB HD5970 at £825. Two HD5870s are no more powerful than four HD4870s, in fact marginally less. Add the fact that dual crossfire scales much better than quad crossfire and you end up with the HD5970 being marginally superior, but it is marginal. This makes the new card worse value per frame as the 4870X2 when it was new!
After this revelation, I think I will have to concede that I won't be able to increase my graphics performance at all, I simply can't afford to do it now it costs a whopping £1130 for two 5970s, or £1650 for the two 4GB cards I wanted. That's as much as my entire PC is worth, and it's no low end system.
I think what I'm going to do is fit an HD5870 to my old Q9550 system to increase my single-GPU performance for games that don't work with crossfire, and use that as a LAN rig. It's all I can afford to do right now.
Re: News - NVIDIA benchmarks GeForce GTX 480 against AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870
Quote:
Originally Posted by
sammorris
Quite frankly, I think the GTX480 already needs a refresh before it's even come out to cut its TDP down to HD5870 levels, or at least slightly higher (even GTX280 levels I would accept) because as it stands, the performance of the GTX480 in real world games is such that you will need at least two, perhaps three of them to run full 2560x1600 games well on high detail, in much the same way as you need two or three HD5870s to do the same.
That's *really* not true... I've got a GTX 260 (192 cores) and it runs every game I've got just fine at 2560*1600 resolution with the exception of Crysis (which just doesn't run well on anything...).
Re: News - NVIDIA benchmarks GeForce GTX 480 against AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870
The ultimate question : How many days after the release of fermi will nvidia go bust?
The ultimate answer: 42
:P
Re: News - NVIDIA benchmarks GeForce GTX 480 against AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Fraz
That's *really* not true... I've got a GTX 260 (192 cores) and it runs every game I've got just fine at 2560*1600 resolution with the exception of Crysis (which just doesn't run well on anything...).
Indeed. 5870 in 1 machine, 4870x2 in another.....both play everything I have tried (except Crysis :P) at 2560x1600 full.
Re: News - NVIDIA benchmarks GeForce GTX 480 against AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870
No really. An HD4870X2 and HD5870 I will accept can do reasonably well, but not a GTX260, not unless you're using minimum or worse detail with no AA or AF.
If you're willing to live with laggy frame rates then yes, you can argue that a GTX260 is enough, but for people like me who want smooth performance and good graphics, not even the HD5870 is enough sadly for today's stupidly demanding games. In STALKER Call Of Pripyat for example you only get a minimum frame rate of 38 and an average of 47 at 1280x1024, when everything is on high. That's about as low as I will accept performance to be for an FPS before it becomes annoying to play, and this is less than a third of the pixels of 2560x1600. We're only using 4x MSAA here too, nothing crazy, and this is ultimately only one monitor, not eyefinity.
If cards like the GTX260 could max games at 2560x1600, stuff like the HD5970 wouldn't exist.
Re: News - NVIDIA benchmarks GeForce GTX 480 against AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870
hm ive always stuck with nvidia since my 9600pro card craped out on me....but im really thinking about my next upgrade to be ati this time, nvidia are failing epic! shame :(
Re: News - NVIDIA benchmarks GeForce GTX 480 against AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870
Reliability, I'll be honest, is a feather in ATI's cap. All cards go wrong from time to time it's fair to say, but the 8800s are dropping like flies at the moment. The fact that drivers break cards simply by them overheating is pretty dodgy as well. If the fan speed accidentally gets forced in ATI's drivers, the card just sets off the overheat warning and tries to up the fan speed, before shutting down the card altogether.
Re: News - NVIDIA benchmarks GeForce GTX 480 against AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870
ATi are still to sort the GSOD issues some 6(?) months since launch of the 58XX, as you mentioned it affects all brands but this particular strikes me as to why its still occurring, atleast you can roll back the nvidia drivers.
Re: News - NVIDIA benchmarks GeForce GTX 480 against AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870
The GSOD is a strange one, as not everybody seems to encounter it. On top of that, the 10.2 drivers fixed it for some and not for others. I have my suspicions it is a strange compatibility issue with certain systems and those built with more forgiving hardware will be less likely to encounter it. Pure guesswork on my part there though.
Also, you make it sound like you can't rollback ATI drivers. You can...
Re: News - NVIDIA benchmarks GeForce GTX 480 against AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870
It isn't meant to read like that, I was merely trying to point out that of the two recent woes for the company one is easily fixed.