NVIDIA unleashes GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 'tessellation monsters'
By Vlad Savov 
posted March 26th 2010 7:01PM
posted March 26th 2010 7:01PM
NVIDIA's first DirectX 11 parts are betting big on tessellation becoming the way games are rendered in the future, with the entire architecture being geared toward taking duties off the CPU and freeing up its cycles to deliver performance improvements elsewhere. This is perhaps no better evidenced than by the fact that both GTX models scored fewer 3DMarks than the Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5850 that they're competing against, but managed to deliver higher frame rates than their respective competitors in in-game benchmarks from NVIDIA. The final bit of major news here relates to SLI scaling, which is frankly remarkable. NVIDIA claims a consistent 90 percent performance improvement (over a single card) when running GTX 480s in tandem, which is as efficient as any multi-GPU setup we've yet seen. After the break you'll find a pair of tech demos and a roundup of the most cogent reviews.
Read - AnandTech: "Fermi's compute-heavy and tessellation-heavy design continues to interest us but home users won't find an advantage to that design today."
Read - HardOCP: "The only thing that "blew us away" was the heat coming out of the video card and the sound of the fan."
Read - PC Perspective: "If you want the fastest single-GPU graphics card then the GTX 480 is the best there is."
Read - HotHardware: "Versus the single-GPU powered Radeon HD 5870, the GeForce GTX 480 is on average roughly 5% - 10% faster."
Read - Hexus: "A lot of juice means a lot of heat and load on the coolers. This is why the GeForce GTX 480's excellent heatsink has to work overtime in keeping the GPU under 100°C."
Read - Legit Reviews: "The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 was known to be hot and fast before it came out and that is exactly what it turned out as being."
These bad boys will be great for folding!
@evoGage
And for heating your house
@archkron The GTX 470 has 1280MB of RAM which works out to be 1.25GB of RAM, not 1.2.
@evoGage If you like massive electricity bills I guess they'd be great for folding. The thing uses 200 more watts than 2 5970's in SLI....that's pretty terrible.
Knock knock. Who's there. The mocking bird...
@tekdemon They had to consume that much. To not loose the fps competition.
I think they failed.
@Sneakz
Who are you talking to?..
@EGOvoruhk Shouldn't have made it a reply but it is in relation to the article. It says 1.2GB where 1.25GB is slightly more correct.
@tekdemon
5970's in SLI? I think you meant CrossFire. Don't comment if you don't know what your talking about.
All in all, too far from my budget. I imagine if you can afford the cards, you can afford the ring to run them, and the cooling necessary.
@HumbleDestroyer you're*
@evoGage
I was expecting "How well does it play Crisis?"
WHAT'S HAPPENING TO US?!?
@Concorde105
You know what? That last comment, by me, was crap.
Now for the REAL one...
And people blame global warming on fossil fuels... XD
@evoGage
See, this is the thing... if all you're using your video card for is gaming, then ATI definitely seems like the more cost-effective choice both for price/performance and power consumption/performance.
But I'm not a gamer. Sure, I don't mind firing a FPS up now and again, but what really fires my imagination about graphics cards are the GPGPU capabilities. And with the limited benchmarks available (going by Anand's review, page 6), it appears that the Nvidia cards cream the ATI cards in OpenCL compute applications. It's too soon to say for sure how things will pan out there in terms of the possibility of writing code that works better on ATI hardware, but right now, Nvidia processes OpenCL considerably faster and only they offer CUDA....
The bottom line is that, for people who care about Folding@Home, or who like me are interested in making their own GPGPU applications, it really seems like Nvidia is the only economical choice.
@tekdemon
It is indeed terrible...
ATI Graphic cards use the term "CrossfireX" to designate dual graphic cards working together
Just buy a PS3! its only 299.
@tekdemon might i ask WAT r u talking about? u know u cant just make up facts.
gtx 480 =463w full load
4970 = 438w full load
source Guru3D
These will go great with Toshiba's micronuclear TerraPower reactors:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/23/toshiba-and-bill-gates-backed-terrapower-discussing-small-scale/
@evoGage
Yeah.... Uh.... I'm just gonna wait until the 5970 gets smaller or some third party manufacturer modifies it into smaller form (perhaps with alternative cooling).
It will obviously take a while but judging by how slowly NVIDIA's going forward, it may take just as long for them to announce their direct competitor to the 5970.
@evoGage
250 Watts? That means if you are blasting full throttle you are dropping 10 cents an hour on this thing. Let's say you do one hour of gaming per day .. that's about $3 a month added to your electricity bill ... but then what's the idle power consumption? A few pennies an hour? This thing could add $5 a month to your electricity bill easily. I guess that's not a lot.
Gamers who spend a few hours a day gaming .. well they'll prolly pay like $15 a month on electricity excluding the current their rig is consuming.
I guess even that's not a big deal .. just pointing it out ok.
@evoGage Pretty, although a little set-back with heat emittance from the GPU unit. I wonder, when will Nvidia release their video card to battle out with the 5970: http://bit.ly/ati-5970-rigged-concepts
@JS
Hope you're not paying $.40/Kw - if you are, you need to move.
@tekdemon 5970's in SLI?
@evoGage
tesselation isnt the biggest thing right now, but a few years down the road, the fermi may prove itself in rendering to be the top dog
@Seb6554 I was saying that 2 gtx480's in SLI use a lot more power than 2 5970's (in Crossfire duh).
@cge10 I made a typo I meant 2 5870's, but you made a typo as well since I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as a 4970.
http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTI2OTYyNDkyNjcxQlpnSjVaeElfN18xX2wucG5n
@Old fogie late bloomer
You are spot on. I do a lot of GPGPU and really looking forward to this. Fermi is pumping out full 64 bit double precision with ECC, and a much smaller DP price than the G80 and GT200 - yay I can scrap SP CFD.
I think people are too naive to appreciate how revolutionary this is. When games take more advantage of CUDA and PhysX these fermi cards will destroy ATi which is using essentially the pipeline style workflow which NVIDIA invented for G80. These cards are going to be great.
@Sneakz Sorry, but according to the IEEE, 1280MB is 1.28 GB, you're thinking of GiB. Good try, though.
@cge10
Dude, you realize that's full system load, right?
There's this thing called TDP. It's 250w for the 480 and 215w for the 470.
@glypo
How much more advantage of CUDA and PhysX do you expect games to take? ATi are stealing a fair slice of NVs pie; without backing from NV themselves developers won't have so much reason to dedicate resources to CUDA and PhyX and alienate a growing market (ATi 4xxx - 6xxx users) Why do this when you can have the best of both worlds?
Woo hoo! When will this be going mobile?
@revoltracers
they won't be viable for a while. the power consumption on these things are ri-FRICKIN-diculous
never...
@bluefisch200 Probably when Liquid Nitrogen is a viable cooling method for laptops.
@revoltracers most likely never they are too much of power hogs OEMS and other system builders arent happy with 480/470's
And AMD/ATI remains the price for performance leader... Silly me for thinking nVidia would help drop the Red Team's prices.
@Wildman: didn't read the article, huh?
@Prokanda
oh but i did, on anandtech and hothardware
quoting the latter:
"and its paltry performance lead doesn't jibe with its projected 25% price premium"
what now?
@Wildman: yeah.. it's next gen hardware for DX11 that's gearing towards tessellation... when new hardware comes out without a lot of software written for it to be used optimally, current gen tests don't really show it off.
also, the whole 90% performance for SLi?
thanks.
@Prokanda
you mean Big Green is counting on tessellation being the way of the future. about the same way they did with physx... and if i'm not mistaken there are about four major titles that capitalize on that capability? i may eat those words, but in current games... and if tesselation does become the next BIG thing, ati's probably coming out with Northern Islands within a year from now.
as for the SLi, yeah, that's pretty insane, makes the whole "buy one now, buy one later" idea a whole lot more palatable. i'm not even going to try to argue with that point.
@Wildman
ATI is also the the most power efficient solution. I mean, the power draw on these things... and the cooler! What a huge cooler!
@archkron
yeah, they're almost better compared to the 5970 in power draw, noise, and heat.
@Wildman: yeah.. 350 really isn't that bad for 1/2 of a next-gen SLi setup. I think that's where it's really going to count.
@Prokanda
350 isn't bad? Thats almost what all my computer uses combined!
@DougieBear
i think 350 was a reference to the price of a 470
@Prokanda
Sorry for some reason I thought you were talking about power draw :/
Price is still immense.
@Wildman
There is no proper benchmarks tests to prove its awesome performance... its really the next gen.
@wegap
This is what envidya drones actually believe.
@Prokanda $350 for starting towards an SLI setup?
Sorry, just me here wishing my dad was rich as hell too.
@archkron Thats what she said
@Wildman
Agreed, I also find it funny that years ago, back in the Radeon 8500 days, nVidia could do nothing else but say that Tessellation was useless (simply because the gForce3 didn't support it and the 8500 did) to the point developers were completely discouraged to use it.
... now they're marketing it as the second coming of Jesus with a free Ferrari for everyone xD