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AtheK

By AtheK,
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AtheK Grand Master

AtheK

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Meet the GTX 480 and GTX 470

 

Today NVIDIA is launching two cards: the GeForce GTX 480, and the GeForce GTX 470. Both of them are based on GF100, the first and largest member of the Fermi family. Right off the bat, we can tell you that neither card is a complete GF100 chip. We know from NVIDIA’s earlier announcements that a complete GF100 is a 512 SP/core part organized in a 4x16x32 fashion, but these first parts will not have all of GF100’s functional units activated. Instead we’ll be getting a 480 core part for the GTX 480, and a 448 core part for the GTX 470. Ultimately we will not be seeing the full power of GF100 right away, but you can be sure that somewhere down the line we’ll see a GTX 485 or GTX 490 with all of GF100’s functional units enabled.

 

What we’re starting out with today at the high-end is the GTX 480, a card based on a GF100 with 1 of the 16 SMs disabled that will sell for $499, making it the primary competitor for the Radeon 5870. The disabled SM has no affect on the ROPs which are part of a separate functional block, but it does cut down on the shading, texturing, and tessellation capabilities of the card compared to where a full GF100 card would be. This gives the GTX 480 the full 48 ROPs and 768KB of L2 cache of GF100, along with 60 texture units, 15 PolyMorph engines, and 480 cores. Although the architectural overhaul means we can’t compare the GTX 480 to the GTX 285 quite as easily as we could the Radeon 5000 series to the Radeon 4000 series, the GTX 480 is still in some ways a doubled-up GTX 285 from a shader standpoint.

 

 

480card.jpg

 

Final Words

 

To wrap things up, let’s start with the obvious: NVIDIA has reclaimed their crown – they have the fastest single-GPU card. The GTX 480 is between 10 and 15% faster than the Radeon 5870 depending on the resolution, giving it a comfortable lead over AMD’s best single-GPU card.

 

With that said, we have to take pause for a wildcard: AMD’s 2GB Radeon 5870, which will be launching soon. We know the 1GB 5870 is RAM-limited at times, and while it’s unlikely more RAM on its own will be enough to make up the performance difference, we can’t fully rule that out until we have the benchmarks we need. If the GTX 480 doesn’t continue to end up being the fastest single-GPU card out there, we’ll be surprised.

 

The best news in this respect is that you’ll have time to soak in the information. With a retail date of April 12th, if AMD launches their card within the next couple of weeks you’ll have a chance to look at the performance of both cards and decide which to get without getting blindsided.

 

On a longer term note, we’re left wondering just how long NVIDIA can maintain this lead. If a 2GB Radeon isn’t enough to break the GTX 480, how about a higher clocked 5800 series part? AMD has had 6 months to refine and respin as necessary; with their partners already producing factory overclocked cards up to 900MHz, it’s too early to count AMD out if they really want to do some binning in order to come up with a faster Radeon 5800.

 

Meanwhile let’s talk about the other factors: price, power, and noise. At $500 the GTX 480 is the world’s fastest single-GPU card, but it’s not a value proposition. The price gap between it and the Radeon 5870 is well above the current performance gap, but this has always been true about the high-end. Bigger than price though is the tradeoff for going with the GTX 480 and its much bigger GPU – it’s hotter, it’s noisier, and it’s more power hungry, all for 10-15% more performance. If you need the fastest thing you can get then the choice is clear, otherwise you’ll have some thinking to decide what you want and what you’re willing to live with in return.

 

Moving on, we have the GTX 470 to discuss. It’s not NVIDIA’s headliner so it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. With a price right between the 5850 and 5870, it delivers performance right where you’d expect it to be. At 5-10% slower than the 5870 on average, it’s actually a straightforward value proposition: you get 90-95% of the performance for around 87% of the price. It’s not a huge bargain, but it’s competitively priced against the 5870. Against the 5850 this is less true where it’s a mere 2-8% faster, but this isn’t unusual for cards above $300 – the best values are rarely found there. The 5850 is the bargain hunter’s card, otherwise if you can spend more pick a price and you’ll find your card. Just keep in mind that the GTX 470 is still going to be louder/hotter than any 5800 series card, so there are tradeoffs to make, and we imagine most people would err towards the side of the cooler Radeon cards.

 

With that out of the way, let’s take a moment to discuss Fermi’s future prospects. Fermi’s compute-heavy and tessellation-heavy design continues to interest us but home users won’t find an advantage to that design today. This is a card that bets on the future and we don’t have our crystal ball. With some good consumer-oriented GPGPU programs and developers taking up variable tessellation NVIDIA could get a lot out of this card, or if that fails to happen they could get less than they hoped for. All we can do is sit and watch – it’s much too early to place our bets.

 

As for NVIDIA’s ecosystem, the situation hasn’t changed much from 2009. NVIDIA continues to offer interesting technologies like PhysX, 3D Vision, and CUDA’s wider GPGPU application library. But none of these are compelling enough on their own, they’re merely the icing on the cake. But if you’re already in NVIDIA’s ecosystem then the choice seems clear: NVIDIA has a DX11 card ready to go that lets you have your cake and eat it too.

 

Finally, as we asked in the title, was it worth the wait? No, probably not. A 15% faster single-GPU card is appreciated and we’re excited to see both AMD and NVIDIA once again on competitive footing with each other, but otherwise with much of Fermi’s enhanced abilities still untapped, we’re going to be waiting far longer for a proper resolution anyhow. For now we’re just happy to finally have Fermi, so that we can move on to the next step.

 

Link: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3783&p=1

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AtheK Grand Master

AtheK

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:fear:

 

they are late, but at least they are in now, performance looks great, price point is sweet.

 

Fastest single GPU card, though 5970 retains the crown of fastest card B)

 

:rofl:

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AtheK Grand Master

AtheK

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15% sounds okay. Wonder when the damn card actually becomes affordable...

 

Newbie question: WTF is the 3xx series of GPUs from Nvidia about if this is Fermi?

 

They have skipped 3xx series, as the cycle was delayed...

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AtheK Grand Master

AtheK

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Cannot wait for the dual GPU card :rofl:

 

Although the power consumption figures for the 480 are pretty scary.

 

Plus a single GPU card that have all the Fermi capabilities activated...

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AtheK Grand Master

AtheK

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abhii toh supercomputer liya tha aap ne sir?? :rofl:

The video card he has is still the fastest, only problem is in some games the Dual GPU combination does not scale up too well, but other then that it pretty much eats everything...

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AtheK Grand Master

AtheK

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^^ don't think they will be here anytime soon, i will say realistic date would be mid may, price well Nvidia usually f**ks up on indian pricing, lets see how they do it, if they match the price of AMD counterpart, they can give AMD some good run for there money...

 

 

Hold on as per the trend, AMD price cut will happen soon :panic:

 

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AtheK Grand Master

AtheK

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There as an official release a day or two ago from the red wagon saying they WILL NOT be cutting prices.

wat do you expect they will say we will cut prices and put the current stock on stand still, it might not happen soon enough, but my guess would be three months from now.

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Solitaire Newbie

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wat do you expect they will say we will cut prices and put the current stock on stand still, it might not happen soon enough, but my guess would be three months from now.

 

Then it might. I wouldn't say "official" word so I've modified my last post.

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playstation Newbie

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The video card he has is still the fastest, only problem is in some games the Dual GPU combination does not scale up too well, but other then that it pretty much eats everything...

thanks for explaining amanwa...hope Mt understand that we wont be able to catch him for quite some time. :D

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