We're still not happy with NVIDIA's failure to publish anything on its site alerting users about
the doom that may befall them if they switched to the 196.75 drivers, but the company's making an effort to get back into our good books with the first official video of its
forthcoming GeForce GTX 480 and even a benchmark run against ATI's flagship
single-GPU card, the
HD 5870. It looks like you'll need to jack in a pair of auxiliary power connectors -- one 8-pin and one 6-pin -- to power the first Fermi card, as well as plenty of clearance in your case to accommodate
its full length (stop giggling!). NVIDIA's benchmarking stressed the GTX 480's superior tesselation performance over the HD 5870, but it was level pegging between the two cards during the more conventional moments. It's all well and good being able to handle extreme amounts of tesselation, but it'll only matter to the end user if game designers use it as extensively as this benchmark did. As ever, wait for the real benchmarks (i.e. games) before deciding who wins, but we're slightly disappointed that NVIDIA's latest and greatest didn't just blow ATI's six-month old right out of the water. Benchmarking result awaits after the break, along with video of the new graphics card and a quick look at
NVIDIA's 3D Vision Surround setup. Go fill your eyes.
posted Mar 6th 2010 7:34AM
"stop giggling"
sorry, but i cant.
wait.
MATCHES?
either engadget fails at graph reading or they cant see there are times during benchmark where the card achieves almost DOUBLE the performance of a 5870 and never goes below it?
Average at the very least 30% faster in that test alone. And i'm being conservative.
if 30 percent faster means "matching" then every cpu and gpu matches their predecessors.
i expected a bit more from engadget.
@doutorpiranha
Did you read the article, stupid? The graph is from NVidia's own tesselation benchmark.
"NVIDIA's benchmarking stressed the GTX 480's superior tesselation performance over the HD 5870, but it was level pegging between the two cards during the more conventional moments."
They are evenly matched when running games and other things that were not NVidia's own (hardware optimized) tesselation benchmark.
@doutorpiranha
Engadget's comment was that it doesn't appear to have much difference in most games (ie: the 99.99999% of games that don't use tesselation yet). The guy in the video even points out the first part of the graph where the 2 lines are almost exactly the same framerate and says that's where there's no tesselation going on.
That's where Engadget is getting their 'not much difference' from - no tesselation = same performance, and quite frankly I expect for the next few years very few games will have any significant level of tesselation.
@doutorpiranha and everyone else,
If you've got an unrelated point to make, don't just reply to the first comment because you want it higher up in the viewing order. Unrelated replies to comments like this one will be deleted. I'm letting you off this one time just so everyone sees it and knows what NOT to do.
@acabtp You need to re-read the article.
The unigine heavan demo is an independently created software package used to demonstrate and benchmark various 3d technologies. It does not belong to either AMD or NVidia. The article states "Nvidias benchamrking" meaning they ran it, not that they wrote it, you even quoted it that way. Tessellation is a feature of DX11, and the benchmark is demonstrating how much better Nvidia is at it than AMD, using an independent benchmark.
There are times during the benchmark where Nvidia is twice as fast as AMD as someone has already posted.
Tessellation is a way for the hardware (AMD or Nvidia) to create extra detail based on a displacement map. A displacement map is a graphics layer which adds 'bumps' to the image in lieu of using real polygons. Tessellation is a way of giving more definition to those bumps by subdividing the area and adding real geometry. This allows for more detail, greater shadow realism, and more simplified character (or data) sets. In other words you get a greater perceived polygon count that uses less data to begin with. It is a good thing.
It's not so much whether games have tesselation or not, the point is Fermi can only do well at tesselation when it's not doing much of anything else, since its using general purpose processing units, not a dedicated tesselator like ATi.
Being able to devote 100% of it's compute capacity to tesselation allows it to own that benchmark, but in a real game you want your graphics card to do other things than just sit there tesselating all day and on a realistic division of workload the two cards are basically evenly matched.
Which would be great, except the nvidia chip costs more to make, consumes more power, and is six months late to the party.
@AXIDE "quite frankly I expect for the next few years very few games will have any significant level of tesselation"
being a gamedev myself, i can assure you that is not correct.
tesselation is a part of the dev pipeline of almost ANY game you play today, its just prebaked to LODs. Frozen meshes at dif detail levels.
Almost all highend games are modeled with subpatching, and being able to do the "meshing" in-game in realtime on a close-to-camera basis is a gigantic step in the right direction.
Can not stop...no way...thats the result of 9 Months...oh man...
@doutorpiranha
Most of the people on this blog are just gamers. And all they want is a new device that they can put in their computer tomorrow that will give them a boost in FPS. Fermi will probably not do this, or at least not enough for the price.
But what people don't realize is that Nvidia has changed the architecture a lot for the developer. And it may take some time until games use the new improvements. Also, Nvidia made architecture changes for for HPC. They didn't put ecc memory on the thing for gamers.
@bebop
I'd suggest you go and brush up on your understanding of this new nVidia's architecture. Fermi does not use all of it's resources for tesselation lol, And it does have a dedicated tesselator. I don't know where did you get that one from. What's the point in just blabbering.
Go read up a little if you're interested in technical aspects of this chip, there's a lot of interesting stuff, white papers etc, don't just blurt things out
@elduderino Ah yes finally, Nvidia Strikes back after (almost 6 months)
Actually when the 5970 was released, a tweeted screenshot from the Ungine game already surfaced, to think that they already have the card but was still testing it until today.
@acabtp
"The graph is from NVidia's own tesselation benchmark."
Wrong.
This benchmark is completely third party, and is used because it is what ATI used to show off their card when first released. The reason their the same at some points is because nothing is happening there... the nature of benchmarks. Overall, if you would actually RUN the numbers, nVidia wins by 60%. Thats a huge performance increase.
@acabtp Can this thing run Crysis ?
@elduderino
many people are remarking about the 5970, which is fair argument. but all these people have not mentioned the GTX 490 which is imminent. in no way am I condoning the wait time for these cards or the price, but many of your arguments against the card have had holes in your theory. i like nvidia and i run them. ATI has really stepped up the game and i think nvidia has to be holding back on some satiating information that will blow our minds
@Celeras then why does it have NVIDIA written in the top right and NVIDIA corperation written in the bottom left?
@0to60 I doubt a GTX 490 will ever exist since the GTX 480 already consumes well over 200W.
As tom's noted in their 5970 review, "For example, ATI reduced the voltages it used and correspondingly dropped the 5970’s clock rates to Radeon HD 5850 levels. This was done to keep maximum board power to 294W—under the defined 300W PCI-SIG electromechanical specification"
There's simply no way for Nvidia to put two cores on one card and fit under the 300W limit. Nvidia focussed too much on GPGPU when most gamers don't care about that functionality.
"Being able to devote 100% of it's compute capacity to tesselation allows it to own that benchmark, but in a real game you want your graphics card to do other things than just sit there tesselating all day and on a realistic division of workload the two cards are basically evenly matched."
@bebop With respect, this analysis is flawed on a number of levels. First of all, in the benchmark the Fermi chip is not devoting "100%" of its capacity to tessellation, it is dynamically load-balancing. The ATI card on the other hand rapidly becomes bottlenecked, with most of its hardware sitting idle. You go on to claim such scenes are 'unrealistic' (in much the same way as engadget describes them as 'unconventional') - well, says who? In years gone by it was 'unrealistic' and 'unconventional' to apply bump-maps to every surface, or employ large, detailed textures, or to run games at more than 1024x768. Tessellation is, it could be argued, a better fit for existing development pipelines than bumpmapping was when it was introduced, because this time around game artists are already working with incredibly detailed source assets.
I'm aware of the other issues surrounding Fermi, such as yield, heat, power consumption etc, but I'm frankly baffled by the headline of this article, and its general tone. The big deal about DX11 is tessellation. The headline could just as well have been "NVIDIA GTX 480 makes benchmarking debut, up to double ATI HD 5870 performance under DX11".
What I see, looking at those graphs, is a dynamic load-balancing card versus one that has bet the farm on a particular ratio between tessellation and shader usage never being exceeded. I see one card with the potential to deliver more consistently playable framerates under DX11. In terms of gameplay, troughs are always more significant than peaks, wouldn't you agree?
@AXIDE dont all game engines tesselate 3d models when rendering? i thought it was a standard thing to do.
I was hoping these Fermi cards would blow away ATI as well. Hopefully, when actual gaming benchmarks come, we'll have a better representation of the card's abilities.
@think before you react
The test was against a 5870 single gpu. That's no where near ATi's 5970 or any of the 59xx's that they have / will have
I'm sorry Nvidia looks like you lost your spot at top graphics cards. ATi's got top, mid, and low range covered it looks like.
@Drybones5 Correct me if I'm wrong, but the 59XX series in amd, are all dual gpu solutions. This 480 GTX is only the first model we've seen in the fermi line up and it is besting the best single card amd/ati has to offer. I also imagine it has very immature drivers. But I will hold my judgement until we get some retail copies out.
@Androidkun Yes, probably the same immature drivers that cause cards to blow up, haha.
@think before you react
Part of me wants Nvidia to be competitive to push graphics technology forward, but the other part of me is still pissed that I lost 2 laptops and a graphics card to "bumpgate" and was never reimbursed.
@Androidkun Look at the power consumption of the GTX480. It consumes MORE power than the 5970! If you think there will be a dual GPU GTX480, the power consumption would require you to have a power supply of over 1000W. You mine as well get two 5970 in crossfire....it would be near impossible to SLI two of nVidia's dual gpu solution!
Beautiful Dragon :')
So the benchmark that this FPS graph is based on involved a lot of tesselation? This is what the Fermi card is good for? But in normal games, performance is equivalent?
@xsacha
Many normal games don't use the same level of tessellation as the benchmark, but as more developers start using DX11 that number will go up, possibly along with the 480's and other Fermi cards' popularity.
@moshee
Yeah, but by the time games are released that fully utilise tesselation it wouldn't matter, cause new video cards would be out by then. There's no point of designing a card TODAY that aims to beat the competition when tesselation is heavily used.
Hahahaha, I think I saw Napoleon Dynamite on that video.
I wonder what will be the price.
@enstriel $650+ I think. Not worth the money because game developers didn't have this card before and weren't using tesselation heavily.
I just hope 5870 and 480 prices fall soon enough.
Looks like nvidia is owning ati now lets hope the price will be reasonable. Also engadget these videos are like a week old. If you subscribe to their channel you would have seen them days ago.
@MoonWalkerCTE
It'd look horrible for NVIDIA if they couldn't at least match ATI and even with those results they don't demolish ATIs 5870
@MoonWalkerCTE
Performance doesn't matter if ATIs cards are cheaper. And considering they've been around for 6 months, you can bet your ass that as soon as the Fermi cards are out, ATI will make a slight price drop to rub it in nVidia's face.
Important thing to remember is that nVidia is definitely loosing money on each of the GTX 480 cards when compared to ATI because their GPU chip is MUCH larger.
@MoonWalkerCTE hmms so the ATI 5970 doesn't exist now eh?
@MoonWalkerCTE nVIDIA is only owning ATi when they actually launch the product. ATi are owning nVIDIA, and have been for a solid 6 months.
The 5 series is complete - 54xx, 55xx, 56xx, 57xx, 58xx, 5970 are all out there and available for purchase. I can't even buy a GTX275 nowadays because they've all gone EOL. Six classes with multiple variants have been churned out by ATi and they are, in my opinion, the most successful graphics cards they made to date.
There's no denying the GTX480 beats the 5870 here, it does, almost doubling the frames at some points. But, we are watching nVIDIA bench an ATi card so I'd like to see some tech sites review it first. Not only that, they still have the 5970 and I am quite certain that ATi will beat nVIDIA at any price point when it comes to performance.
I have plenty of ATi and nVIDIA cards (currently using trusty 8800GT) but there's no denying ATi have come back hard. The 4xxx were a success and the 5xxx has also been brilliant.
Every aspect of the cards is impressive. The engineering and project management that went into it is simply astounding. There's a great read here that explains what happened to make it so successful - http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3740
All in all, nVIDIA have come late to this fight, can't match ATi on price, and haven't got anything I can hold in my hands today. This has been happening for several months. ATi are working hard on their next gen and I think the lead time they have will produce another winning product.
Be happy ATi are kicking nVIDIA's butt right now. The competition is great for consumers. nVIDIA are and always have been very successful, but for enthusiasts, ATi has won most of them over (.. for now).
@WEEEGEEEE
They were comparing the 480 to its equivalent *single-die* card. The 5970 is 2 5870's on one card, I think. No doubt that would kill the 480.
@MoonWalkerCTE
you DO remember nvidia claimed 45% performance gain over the 5870
@DAZA
Yeah... When they launch the Fermi they'll be owning ATI all right...
...For a day.
Then ATI will announce a mid-generation refresh with the 5890, 5990, etc. ATI will own them back. Nvidia will be back where they started.
@psychoticdream isn't that what we see?
NVIDIA is simply a great company.
Neither ATI or NVIDIA will be going losing their share of the market anytime soon. As long as they are the only ones. (Hence the phones market)
@Techno1q grr. will be losing*
I'm sad to say, but the last graphics card I baught was a geforce 7 series card that I thought was hardcore. But ever sense, I switched over for reliability issues when nvidia wouldn't help me out when my laptop died from a GPU heat stroke. I really like nvdia for price/performance, but they need to get on reliability. It's like buy a nice car that's gonna out in 3000 miles when it's new.
The grass looked good, but I'm not paying that much dinero for pretty grass.
don't count on it.
So, how much you wanna bet these are gonna cost twice as much as the 5870's?
@(Unverified) Maybe twice as much is wrong, but considerably more for sure... Nvidia is great and all, but the prices are just stupid. Why should I pay more for the Nvidia brand name? ATI does the same for less money.
@CJisohsocool Not if if merely "matches" the 5870, it won't.
When the ATI 6000 series comes out, they will crush the GTX 400's
I think Nvidia is falling behind. They are only going to have the lead for a short time.