| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 Fermi Video Card |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards | |
| Written by Olin Coles | |
| Friday, 26 March 2010 | |
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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 Video Card ReviewPC video game enthusiasts have depended on two companies to deliver graphics power for their computer system: NVIDIA and ATI. While it's convenient for NVIDIA to enjoy fan favoritism for the past decade, ATI has recently enjoyed strong sales and a decisive head-start on the growing DirectX-11 consumer market over the past six months (as evidenced by our unbelievably long list of recent video card reviews). The ATI Radeon HD 5000 series has earned AMD new respect, but many inside the industry have impatiently waited on NVIDIA to respond with their fabled GF100 Fermi DX11 architecture. At long last, NVIDIA's Fermi is a reality. At the center of every new technology is purpose, and NVIDIA has designed their Fermi GF100 GPU with an end-goal of redefining the video game experience through significant graphics processor innovations. Disruptive technology often changes the way users interact with computers, and the GeForce GTX-480 graphics card is a complex tool built to arrive at one simple destination: immersive entertainment. Priced at $499, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 empowers DirectX-11 video games to deliver unmatched geometric realism. In this article Benchmark Reviews tests 3D frame rate performance of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480, and demonstrates how well Fermi architecture fits in with GeForce 3D Vision.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 Video CardTSMC, the largest semiconductor foundry on the planet, has had a great deal of difficulty shrinking their business. Originally intended to feature 512 CUDA cores, NVIDIA was faced with limited yields from TSMC, and decided to end the consumers wait and offer gamers and PC hardware enthusiasts a 480-core solution. Some readers may recall that AMD reacted to their yield crisis differently, and decided it would look better to announce a product with extremely-limited quantities. While this tactic works well for review samples and a pretty press release, NVIDIA knows that gamers want to actually own the video card... not just read about it. NVIDIA presents to us the GeForce GTX-480 graphics card. Powered by 48 ROPs and 480 unified CUDA (shader) cores, the GF100 Fermi GPU has 3.2-billion transistors to help process DirectX-11 commands and render some of the most detailed graphics ever seen on the PC platform. Tessellation is the word for 2010, and DX11 brings movie-quality graphics to life on consumer-level video games. Benchmark Reviews tests graphics frame rate performance of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 using several of the most demanding PC video game titles and benchmark software available. Old favorites such as Crysis Warhead, Far Cry 2, Resident Evil 5, and PCMark Vantage are all included. New to the scene are Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Stalker: Call of Pripyat, BattleForge, and the recently announced Unigine Heaven 2.0 benchmark. EDITOR'S NOTE: Since testing NVIDIA's engineering sample for this article, we've received retail GeForce GTX-480 products that perform the same but require less power and produce less heat and noise. Read more in our Zotac GeForce GTX-480 Fermi Video Card review, which also includes SLI performance results. About NVIDIA Corporation:
NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) is the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, a high-performance processor which generates breathtaking, interactive graphics on workstations, personal computers, game consoles, and mobile devices. NVIDIA serves the entertainment and consumer market with its GeForce® products, the professional design and visualization market with its Quadro products, and the high-performance computing market with its Tesla products. These products are transforming visually-rich and computationally-intensive applications such as video games, film production, broadcasting, industrial design, financial modeling, space exploration, and medical imaging. NVIDIA Product Lines
GeForce - GPUs dedicated to graphics and video.
Quadro - A complete range of professional solutions engineered to deliver breakthrough performance and quality.
Tesla - A massively-parallel multi-threaded architecture for high-performance computing problems.
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Comments
1. power useage, when they inevitably use a lot of power sucking add ons - printers, joysticks, and multiple monitors ?
HOW STUPID does a noob have to be to whine about power from one component ? PRETTY STUPID.
2. fan noise... as they crank their speakers to maximum, enjoy the 3D sound environment, or have their headphones on while they scream into the mic about who they just fragged to their teammates.
3. Heat... after years of reviews and building systems and selling, not once have I seen some idiot post that any card they were using expired from H E A T.
It's always some notional crazed ati fanboy geek preening about saving the earth,or wailing about less electricity cost than they jam down their throats in cheetoes and soda in a single frag session.
AVOID high end cards, and get yer $299 netbook tweaked for Pogo online.
I don't see "blazing fast" anywhere, but I see "blazing hot" as a better descriptor. In games the 5970 is still killing it, and using about 70 watts less power. I would have to choose a 5970 over this new nVidia card at the moment. We waited, and waited, and all we got was a campfire that needs a lot of wood to burn.
The heat is pretty bad however. Nvidia says that they tested the gpu on that load heat extensively.
The other problems that the 5970 has is microstuttering. They've done an analysis that shows spikes even when vsync is turned on. Aside from heat and power consumption, the 480 is a pretty decent choice in gaming hardware. People who've left reviews of it on newegg have said that it isn't as loud as people make it out to be.
With those two the ati card gets stomped on every level, and the 470 beats the reds bigger brother often enough.
All the bleating red roosters won't stop the awesome NV sales numbers.
For now, it's red rooster cry and lie time.
Stomp the three toed chicken feet, and bleat like a mad modder, and all for nought, the SUPERSTOMP has already occurred, and no amount of red rooster bs can change that. (you probably believe yourself to keep from weeping)
You should go test for yourself before trying to discredit somebody else's hard work.
- Always hits 97C regardless of case cooling when gaming.
- Super LOUD Fan (65db?s +/- 2db).
- Never buy without Lifetime Warranty (source: Anantech)
- 10% to 15% faster in some cases vs. HD 5870 (source: 15+ review sites)
- Price/Performance stinks beyond belief (source: 15+ review sites)
- 250W is complete BS, its 300W+, NVIDIA lied (source: Toms Hardware)
- Nvidia's Fermi GTX480 is Broken, Unfixable, Hot, Slow, Late and Un-manufacturable.
this card has a single gpu and differnce between it and the 5970(2 gpu)
is only a 4 to 8 frames only the nivdia is a single u noob :S
nvidia can shove this up their ass. whats the point of this failure card?
wow its a little faster then the hd5970.
no where near fast enough. its sad
Perhaps by coincidence XFX and BFG are not listing the GeForce GTX 480 at NewEgg; and are the only manufacturers to offer a lifetime product warranty.
Check here:
#digitalstormonline.com/comploadsaved.asp?id=395218
YOU MUST BUY A V-CARD by it's speed not by the it's MONO gpu property. as what NVIDIA said before "Two is Better than One" on their SLI motto.
The merge of AMD and ATI gives ATI a larger R&D division and have an independent fabs while NVIDIA uses a fabs by TSMC to produce GPU's.
ATI before was a Buggy Videocard Manufaturer making color shifts on my monitor and now becoming a hard competitor of NVIDIA
Another Comment:
Intel must buy NVIDIA to beat the One and hard competitor AMD
Anybody buying this piece of garbage is pure NVIDIA FANbOy LOL
People who buy it want the fastest single gpu but will have to factor in heat and power consumption. They wouldn't be fanboys as only fanboys buy from one company and ignore facts so they can diss the competition. Like what you did.
Based on what? It wasn't this article, because the GTX 480 beat the Radeon HD5870 by an average of 25%.
480gtx HD5970
Single 1.5gb memory basically dual 1gb(2gb) memory
Core Clock 725MHz Core Clock 725MHz
Memory Interface 384bit Memory Interface(256 x 2)-bit
$250 for more memory, less heat, less noise, less power consumption.
my gtx 285 will do the job for a while to come, to me, when im running at 50fps+ why on earth would i need to run 90% faster? its a waste of money.
Despite the 40nm process, three key features that will be based on Evergreen have been put on steroids. Please observe bellow:
- 40nm Process
- 2400 Stream Processing Units (1)
- 256 Texture Address Units (2)
- 128 ROPs (Rasterization Operator Units) (3)
AMD plans to differentiate this re-fresh line from the past HD 4890 naming sceme due to its architectural changes. So don't expect the name HD 5890.
Though we will see an improvement in Tessellation, it?s not highly emphasised in Southern Islands (SI). You can look for this feature being greatly improved in code name Northern Islands.
ATI Code Name called ?Hecatoncheires? is something that will feature a series of technological advancements never heard of in the GPU industry. You will never find any information about this special architecture due to is being extremely top secret.
Overpriced, Too hot , Too loud , Too late
NVIDIA have definatly being spanked this time!
In Australia gtx 480 is currently retaling for around $900 .
Yet the 5970 is the same price .I know which card I'll be buying.
second: need 370 watt! bom power.
third: price.
i think amd hd 5870 the winner in single gpu. but if the cuda implement c++ is the +++, what do u think?
But I am actually interested of what the GTX 470 its capable of. Maybe it will win the single gpu radeon. And if it dosent get that hot it may be a good candy for gamers.
Fermi can lick my bawlz.... I'm leaning more and more towards ATI and I have an instinct that another release is coming on thier front.
I've noticed that most nVidia fanboys are ridiculously uneducated with their rants.... fermi is not a good release. Limited supply, way too hot, too much power consumption, and barely faster than the 5870 which is the king as far as I am concerned from a price/power/performance perspective.
I used to be an nVidia fanboy, but I think this war is goin in the other direction.
From what I've seen, the first thing you'll notice at review sites that allow comments is the ATI regular anti-fermi comments regardless of what the review shows.
If the 480 shows a 4 fps difference from the 5970 -- ATI fanboy comment is "The 5970 totally beat the 480. Wasn't even close!"
If nothing else "The 480 is hot enough to boil water!"
Scroll up and you'll see a guy say that the 480's idle temp is 70c.
As for price/performance.. Check this out.
(FPS from all benches)
GTX 480
95.2, 82.5, 73.6, 62, 41, 33, 92.7, 78.4, 108, 118, 35.5, 32.5, 48.8, 45
AVG: 67.6
Price per performance: $7.40
HD 5870
53.6, 45.1, 29.3, 22.9, 33, 29, 68, 57.6, 90, 83, 29.3, 26.9, 29.3, 27.4
AVG:43
Price per performance: $9.30
Hows that for education?
One thing you forgot to mention is that if you are a casual gamer and want to break free of Windows...a 480 GTX actually in practically every game ran under Linux + Wine delivers at least 60 FPS. ATI cards won't even boot games on Linux due to how bad their drivers are....
I own more ATI cards than Nvidia Cards, thanks to Nvidia...I was able to move to Linux as my main OS and retain windows for only the heaviest of games.
Both the 5970 and 480 are amazing cards. My 480 heavily overclocked never hits 91C+ on load and sits around 70C idle. So yeah its hot, just get an air conditioner in the summer and your fine. Doesn't consume much power for what it is I think. My X6 1055T consumes just as much power on load.
And technically, I'm neutral with both vendors, but the 480 is stronger TECHNICALLY. It's 1 GPU vs the 5970 which is 2 GPUs and the 480 is trailing just behind it.
So far wht I have seen though is the 5970 plays Dx10 games and under better, the 480 is known to play Dx11 games better. So both good and bad.