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 March 6th 2010 7:34AM
So if the GTX 480 gives roughly the same performance as the 5870, where does that put the GTX 295 when you compare it to ATi's range?
@TacticalTimbo now GTX 295 is slightly higher than 5870, although it has more power consumption and outputs more heat along with costing about the same without DX11 or 1GB of memory per GPU.
@(Unverified)
So let me get this straight, the GTX 295 is slightly above the 5870 in performance and the GTX 480 is about the same. So why is the 480 even in existence, let alone at a price likely way higher than the 295...is it just for the DX11 support? If so, pretty lame!
@elduderino
"why is it so hot in here?"
"i'm baking a pie"
"there's nothing in the oven"
"who said i'm using the oven?
*rimshot*
IDE, nice.
A Nvidia card matches an AMD card that has been out for months, in Nvidia's own benchmark? Sorry, I am very unimpressed. If it only "matches" AMD's current offerings, thats not good enough.
My favorite part is how he didn't simply tell us what the card scored on the benchmark at the end, he just shows us that graph... wonder if there's something he didn't want us to know about the final score of the 5870 vs the 480.
Like the no AA settings of the benchmark. I have run this benchmark and I know that ATI takes a hit with AA. It seems like NVidia gets hit MORE or they would have turned it on.
@deathofallthings look at the graph its consistently above the red line...it means it did better you dont need to see a number to work that one out.
You guys are funny. Few are thinking critically. What you didn't pull out from the video that you should have is that in the action environment Nvidia beats ATI double. In town, the static environment of the game ATI ties Nvidia. LOL Nvidia is mocking ATI. And the responces that you provided and just what Nvidia wanted....you fools. Nvidia fooled you. Expect a minimum 50%-100% improvement where it matters, and a 200% improvement over cutting detail gaming.
That case is bad ass. I want one.
I hate NVIDIA. Their cards are too expensive and compared to ATi are just plain crap. ATi's HD 5970 will be the top of the line for a nice long time... until ATi releases the HD 6000 series...
So is nvidia going to have any midrange DX11 cards? and whats with the huge naming gap between the 295 and 480?
@npa189 ATI has the 5770 as the midrange card (around $160) which performs a little bit better than my 4870. Above that is the 5830 (around $250). Between the two is the 4890. Tom's Hardware has a good guide every month for the best cards at each price point: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gaming-graphics-card,2544.html
@npa189
didnt you read the other articles on nvidia cards npa?
basically nvidia took 9000 series cards and rebranded some as 200 series then took some of the 200 series and rebranded them as 300 series giving some of them dx10.1 and some not
thats about the basic gist of it
as for midrange 400 series the 470 is gonna be their midrange more than likely and at least gonna hit 400 bucks (not sure tho)
waiting for review ^_^
Sadly Nvidia has to push the power limits for there new cards. The wattage and requirements for these new Nvidia cards are rediculus...
I have a ATI 4890 paired with a x4 Phenom and 4 Gig's of ram and 3 hard drives, and thats all on a 650 watt power supply....Most...and I mean most of these newer Nvidia cards require 700-750 minimum to run...power efficiency just ran out the door there. The reason I use ATI is for a few reasons...1...When not using 3D graphics the ATI 4800 series cards downclock to something like 220mhz....Does Nvidia cards do that? NO... 2...ATI seems to know there drivers, Nvidia...not so much...When I did own a Nvidia card I used to have issues with dual displays....same setup, now 4890.....where one of the monitors would just randomly flicker on and off....which is a driver issue...and thoughout the 6-8 driver releases I had it never seemed to be fixed. Since then I moved to ATI and have never had a problem with my screens flicker on and off and such. Yeah I know its all about the #'s...but in true real life reality....the differences you'll see is nothing....a 3Dbenchmark score of 15000 for nvidia and a score of 13800 for ATI in real life stands for about .5 to 1fps faster...and in my opinion that is not worth the price difference....not the cost of having to buy a rediculus high powered Power Supply.
Hey Engadget, maybe you should do your homework before you post garbage:
http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index5.aspx?lang=en-us
"196.75 Alert!
We are aware that some customers have reported fan speed issues with the latest 196.75 WHQL drivers on NVIDIA.com. Until we can verify and root cause this issue, we recommend that customers do not download this driver. Instead, please stay with, or return to 196.21 WHQL drivers. Release 196.75 drivers have been temporarily removed from our website and we also are asking our partners and others to remove temporarily this 196.75 WHQL driver as well."
@wtfengadget I'm aware that alert's gone up, but at the time of writing it wasn't. Any other after-the-fact observations you'd like to throw our way?
@Vlad Savov If you're going to post crap like that you are responsible for providing updates, given your role in influencing people. People will read this article for days to come, and it will circulate. You title an article about GTX480 performance showing a clear win in the benchmark as "matches" a 5870. Then you open the article flaming NVIDIAs driver issue. Why? If you're going to bother mentioning it, update your story.
Now that Just Cause 2 has announced exclusive shadows and water graphics with Nvidia is there even a point to even considering an ATI card ever again?
@Lord Jezo Well considering Just Cause 1 only got a 75/100 on metacritic, I don't think I'll be spending hundreds of dollars extra for a card that performs the same in all other games.
this card is a letdown :/ hurry up and come out with a new one, nvidia!
Haha pretty damn funny! BUT, they have DEFINATELY informed all users of their drivers about their faulty latest drivers, they sent emails telling users to revert back to the older ones and that they removed the latest drivers off their website, but i guess should be more publicised on nvidia.com!
Kind of regret my SLI gtx260
to parapharse my friend who owns a $800 laptop with 4650 mobile graphics.
introducing crysis 3, now all you do is look at the trees in 1600p with super testilation.
Ok, so nVidia finally hits with some Fermi stuff, and appears that it's basically just on par with the ATi offerings? After all the posturing, the "wait till you see this" and the insufferable nVidia fanboy posts we've all had to deal with since ATi's 5xxx series hit? Really?
I'm curious to see how the power requirements stack up between ATi and nVidia's comparable cards. It kinda looks like that Fermi hardware is going to suck the juice pretty hard.
Hmmm this is not convincing , did anyone payed attention to Heaven benchmark version? Its 1.1 whereas on their webpage only 1.0 is available. You cant compare correctly videocards with different software version !
@HellFlyer
I would not worry about it. I ran the Heaven benchmark with my ATI card and the readings came out about the same as the chart showed. I doubt NVidia would stoop that low to fudge a benchmark what with the card in reviewers hands in the next few days...
It matches the performance of the 5870... disappointing but an acceptable level of performance.
I use my GPU to transcode video. I'm betting the GTX 480 will mop the floor with my GTX 285s. (The program uses only one GPU at a time.)
I'll probably sell my GTX 285s for a GTX 480.
How can people stand to look at this? Nvidia had 6 months, ONE THIRD of the Moore's cycle, to push a graphics card out that would wipe the floor with the 5870. Instead, they made some sort of beast that needs both a 6 and 8 pin connector, which not only means it needs a lot of power, but that it generates a lot of heat, that only provides a 15 or so FPS boost in heavy tessellation, and no boost in regular gameplay. I forecast Nvidia's stocks falling.
So wait this is their newest which is a bigger and sucks up more power than the past revisions while only performing on par with what has been out for a couple of months now from AMD?
Hmmm took awhile to get to market yet is just a bigger revision of a past shipped product which doesn't perform much better. Wait a minute when did Apple buy up nVidia?
glad I dumped a 5 series ATI into my box, it even seems to load faster with the nvidia junk out of a 5 yr install.
i'm so disappointed with the results. Almost 5 months of delay into the game and just these numbers? I was expecting a pure pwnage for the price they're charging. Anyway, i'll stick with my gtx-260 at least for another generation or two as i think it's more than decent enough to run most of the games these days. Don't know if it'll run crysis 2 though...
So after 6 months of optimizing all Nvidia has to show is the Unigine Benchmark that currently relates to no real game?
They've cheated in the past with 3DMARK why not cheat in Unigine?
Brings back more memories of the FX 5800 series yet again lotz of synthetic benchmarks no game performance until it was 'fixed' 6 months later.
This reminds me of the R600 and NV30 launches with all the synthetic 'proof' that they would destroy the competition and both flopped. They both led to better refreshes but they both sucked compared to what was promised and both were hailed as the future of architecture.
If they can only show one canned benchmark that already has been called unbalanced but no games then it doesn't look good for this card. If it were a good gaming card and not just compute card then they would've shown Crysis, Aliens-vs-Predator or something people actually play. That they didn't show 3DMARK scores which was their darling which means it likely doesn't show well for them there either.
I'll believe benchmarks when they come from review sites that don't have to follow the Nvidia review guide either. This is too important for Nvidia to not pull their usual dirty tricks.
@Kshader
The Fermi cards will be in reviewers hands in the next few days since the launch is only a couple of weeks out. I doubt they would try anything as mundane as tweaking the Heaven benchmark which is available to anyone and everyone. I ran it with the ATI 5870 and the numbers seemed right. The only thing I do not understand is why no AA?
Sadly, I could likely buy 2x5870's and only spend about $100 more than a single GTX 480
The new Fermi card has the exact same footprint as the GTX 280 graphics card, 10.5 inches long, two slots wide. I took the picture of the bare board shown a while ago and resized the picture until the SLI pins exactly matched the GTX 280 in my hand. The power connectors lined up exactly too at that size. Another picture got me the end of the board, so pretty clear this IS the size.
@futurerheza Sometime after never, but certainly before the MBA gets it.