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Nvidia's GF100 Turns Into GeForce GTX 480 and 470
crazipper writes "After months of talking architecture and functionality, Nvidia is finally going public with the performance of its $500 GeForce GTX 480 and $350 GeForce GTX 470 graphics cards, both derived from the company's first DirectX 11-capable GPU, GF100. Tom's Hardware just posted a comprehensive look at the new cards, including their power requirements and performance attributes. Two GTX 480s in SLI seem to scale impressively well — providing you have $1,000 for graphics, a beefy power supply, and a case with lots of airflow."
They caught up with ATI but with a more expensive, hotter and more
power hungry card.
Seriously, that whole thing about drivers earlier makes me wonder if it's worth it to buy this beef without any way to make it sizzle.
Come on - is that all? There HAS to be a way I can spend 5 times that to play a video game.
Sounds like the GF100 turned into the MRS100.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
It seems like NVIDIA has fallen into the same trap as with GeForce 5XXX generation launch.
That there are a lot of lunatic performance enthusiasts and deep-pocketed GPU computing users out there. $500, 250 watts, only modestly faster than the competitor's cheaper, cooler card that has been out for some months now, and has variants and cut-downs spanning more or less the entire price/performance spectrum from sub-$100 to mid $400s...
One cannot deny that they are, in fact, the fastest; but in all other respects they just got owned. More power draw than a CPU from the bad old days of Prescott(and Prescott was 90nm, this sucker is 40nm), a gigantic die that must cost a small fortune just to manufacture, hideously audible fan noise just to keep the thing from melting down. They'll have to cut the power draw by a factor of five to land any laptop design wins at all, a factor of ten for anything that isn't a 2.5 inch thick gamer box of a laptop.
Unless there is a large enough market of crazy gamers who just must have the fastest, or GPU computing people who don't care how expensive or noisy these cards are because they are in the datacenter doing some sort of algorithmic trading, Nvidia has a real loser on their hands...
So I can choose between nice 20W idle with ATI, but shit windows and goddamn awful linux drivers with only outdated X.org / kernel support for the cards.
Or this power hungry overpriced heater (yay, summer is coming), which at least has decent drivers.
The Free Market has failed us! Damn commies!
Ryan Fenton
What do you know, heaters for PCIe come with moderately fast GPUs onboard these days!
There's also an Anand Tech review which is pretty good and has plenty of different benchmarks. It has the added benefit of testing a 480 SLI configuration which produces some interesting results. It also presents some benchmarks that help to show off nVidia's GPGPU performance as well, which is something that they've been using to hype these new cards.
In my own opinion, ATI still has a competitive advantage, especially considering that they can always drop their price if they feel threatened. nVidia is lucky that they have the ION and Tegra to fall back on, because it doesn't seems as though they don't have a pot to piss in right now in terms of high-end desktop graphics offerings. The 480 seems to be about equal to similarly priced ATI offerings and doesn't give them the edge in performance that they're accustomed to having.
I mean look at it like this. You can probably get a card for $120-$150 now that will probably run every current game well right now. (Well except for Crisis) So there is no point in buying it for current games. You could get that $500 card hoping that it will run future games well but it never seems to happen that way.(They're slow no matter what old card you have.) Instead you can just buy another $120-$150 card in a few years and that one will run it well. (This way you end up spending less money and actually get better performance.) So my experience is just buy a decent card ($120-$150) and in a few years buy another one and do whatever with the old one. (Sell it, give it to a family member whatever.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I got me one of these back in october for $400. (Eh, pricy, but worth every cent) Its a nice 2gb video card.
I love seeing new generations of hardware come out. It means that the perfectly adequate cards from two years ago will be even cheaper.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
It's about time a product acknowledged my desktop grilling needs.
Another review here points to slightly more of a performance edge to the GTX 480 and 470:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=888
Why is Slashdot reporting on this? Did you tell me back in April 2000 that the Geforce 2 was the only card I'd ever need? This betrayal hurts, it really does.
These new cards, as usual, are way too expensive. I had the best video card when Doom3 came out. Since then I've upgraded once, and need a whole new motherboard, CPU, and RAM before I can upgrade to a newer card. This is why people turn to consoles. This is what's killing PC gaming. I really hope on-live works out, as I see it as the ultimate solution to this problem without having to resort to an xbox/ps3.
Doom 3 was released 6 years ago, are you telling me that the PS3 and Xbox360 came out 6 years ago?
I don't know what your priorities are for computing needs but you are on Slashdot and your telling me you do a refresh every 6 years or so?
I'm paid to do CAD for a living so I need a beast at home to do work on but I could not imagine a 6 year old, what an original Athlon or P3 could even handle 1080p streaming content, let alone any hardcore programming environment for compiling or a modern parametric modeler.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
a 40nm 9800GT with 80W TPD. The 9800 is fast enough for my needs and has been for 2 years now. Less heat. Less power. Less noise. A 150W video card has absolutely no appeal to me.
You don't have to get the absolute best ya know? OnLive - a youtube like gaming service - is unlikely to give you a better gaming experience than a $70 graphic card. If you got to have the absolute best graphics out there then the PS360 is already getting long in the tooth and MS/Sony is fretting more about their Wii inspired controllers than graphics these days.
Well what on earth are you buying the new cards for? Last year's mid-range cards are far cheaper and perfectly adequate for any game around (especially if you run at console-standard 720p). Also, if you last upgraded in 2004 - you'd be needing a new console by now anyways. Not many games released for the PS2 or Xbox lately.
On-Live will be ok for slower-paced games (latency kills any FPS playing), but you'll need a fairly beefy connection if you want even console-level resolutions, let alone PC-level. Plus, the larger the frame size, the greater the transmit time and the larger the latency.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
The only real reason I wanted to get a Fermi / GTX480 card was to experiment with GPGPU and finally be able
to work at reasonable performance using double precision algorithms which my 8800GT won't do.
Now I find that they've crippled the double precision performance to something like 1/4th the hardware's actual capability
just to price gouge the developers that want that capability as opposed to just playing video games.
So as it stands the AMD 5870 is about 2/3rds the price or so and has 4x the double precision performance, runs a fair
bit cooler, and has been available for many months as well. I think I'll have to pass on the Fermi / GTX4xx series cards
until they get to their senses and make a product that is fully competitive with the much older and much cheaper AMD
58xx series products performances in this regard.
I don't really see why NVIDIA would think that it is reasonable to cripple DP performance for market segmentation reasons
as if somehow DP wasn't a mainstream necessity for consumer and small business computing; every CPU out there has had a DP
FPU for decades now (and wouldn't have if it wasn't useful to absolutely ordinary tasks), and OpenCL / DirectCompute / HDR / etc. etc. are all technologies that very much benefit from DP that are being pushed heavily for mainstream multimedia, image processing, and ordinary PC application performance enhancement.
It is hardly esoteric HPC level stuff these days. Actually the real question is why it has taken so long
to get quad precision / long double / whatever standardized into the computer languages / compilers (C, C++, CLR) and CPUs / GPUs, it would've been a logical progression around the time things went to 64 bit or earlier (for different but analogous reasons).
Now if only AMD's drivers and OpenCL implementations weren't quite so bad. . .
And you know who buys the top of the line super expensive cards? Pretty much no one. Everyone else either buys a mid-range card or last years top of the line. Both of those will last you a few years and the all around computer cost is less than a console.
Don't believe me that consoles are more expensive? I'm a PC gamer (who occasionally plays console games) and a friend of mine is a console gamer (who occasionally plays PC games). He tries to use your argument about "it's expensive with upgrading your computer", yet he ignores the fact that 1) console games virtually never go down in price, where PC games drop in price very quickly after the first few months and 2) Consoles nickel and dime you to death. We actually sat down and did the math one time and for his Wii, 360, PS3 and enough controllers for 4 players on each, it came out to over $2,500 for just the console hardware. You can easily buy two very good gaming systems for less money over the course of the lifespan of a console generation.
So no, people don't turn to consoles because they're cheaper, people turn to consoles because they can't do basic math.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
And you know who buys the top of the line super expensive cards? Pretty much no one. Everyone else either buys a mid-range card or last years top of the line. Both of those will last you a few years and the all around computer cost is less than a console.
Don't believe me that consoles are more expensive? I'm a PC gamer (who occasionally plays console games) and a friend of mine is a console gamer (who occasionally plays PC games). He tries to use your argument about "it's expensive with upgrading your computer", yet he ignores the fact that 1) console games virtually never go down in price, where PC games drop in price very quickly after the first few months and 2) Consoles nickel and dime you to death. We actually sat down and did the math one time and for his Wii, 360, PS3 and enough controllers for 4 players on each, it came out to over $2,500 for just the console hardware. You can easily buy two very good gaming systems for less money over the course of the lifespan of a console generation.
So no, people don't turn to consoles because they're cheaper, people turn to consoles because they can't do basic math.
Actually, people do buy the super expensive cards, and it's often not a bad deal.
I got myself an NVIDIA GTX8800 when it just came out. It ran super hot, cost me quite a bit, but it was the fastest single-card/single-chip 3D accelerator on the market for something like a year, and even when faster cards came out, the difference was something like 10% for a long time.
In the end however, it was cheaper for me to buy a very good card once and keep it for a couple of years, than to repeatedly buy older model cards at a lower price to be able to play the latest games.
I could play Crysis just fine at 1920x1200 when it was first available, which was pretty much only possible on that card or an SLI system, unless you enjoyed playing the "Crysis slideshow". If I had an older model card, I'd have been forced to upgrade.
And you know who buys the top of the line super expensive cards? Pretty much no one.
Then why can't supply satisfy demand? Prices on all the enthusiast-oriented cards have been going up for months, and if you really want a top-end card (5970 for example), it's really hard to find one.
Monitors are getting bigger and cheaper, and a lot of people want to play at (minimally) 1900x1200 at high settings. For newer games that takes expensive cards.
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. --Dan Kaminsky
We actually sat down and did the math one time and for his Wii, 360, PS3 and enough controllers for 4 players on each, it came out to over $2,500 for just the console hardware. You can easily buy two very good gaming systems for less money over the course of the lifespan of a console generation.
So you can buy two PCs (that can have one, or at most two people playing at once) or you can buy three consoles and enough peripheral hardware to have four people playing at once on each console and... consoles are more expensive?
Consoles are also more convenient. Turn it on. Put in a disc, or load a game off the hard drive. Play. Turn it off. Easy.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
I think Fermi can be summed up with the comments near the bottom of the Crysis Warhead benchmark in the review done by AnandTech. "The GTX 400 series completely tramples the 5000 series when it comes to minimum framerates, far more than we would have expected. " Fermi is a mac truck that ploughs though the tougher scenes. There is nothing worst than having smoke, explosions, and water falls etc causing graphics spikes.
All their boasting cannot obscure that. Nvidia has nothing this market round. Maybe they will be back in the game next round, but only if they can moderate their arrogance and stop lying to their customers. Otherweise it looks like Nvidia may be going to be history with regard to the consumer market.
I certainly will not buy from them again after 2 failed GFX cards (the bump problem) and 1 failed mainboard (much too much heat), both from shoddy engineering on their part. It also seems that they have lost their edge on the driver side. I have now had several instances were Nvidia GFX crashed, while AMD GFX did not. May also be that Nvidia hardware is now so bad that the drivers cannot compensate anymore.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Per subject, what would be a reasonable card for playing with GPGPU tech (under Win7)? I have been thinking about the GT220 or GT240, and while I am bombarded with reviews by Top Elite gamer sites indicating that these are low to mid range cards, as far as I can tell they basically do what the higher range cards do, but with fewer cores/less memory/slower clock. And the only significant thing I might be missing out on is double precision arithmetic.
Of course, I am likely to be wrong... what else would I not be able to play with GPGPU-wise by considering a $80ish card rather than a $1000 one?
And don't forget the price of the games.
Here in the UK PC games are a standard £30/35 Sterling and have been for years. A lot of console games that I see in the stores are up to and above 50% more expensive.
My PC has an HD4670 1GB installed.
Do I need to upgrade?
If I do, which card should I upgrade to? ATI or Nvidia?
BTW, my PSU is rated 1,500W. Silverstone.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Möbius toilet?
Where time becomes a poop? Becomes a poop? Becomes a poop?
The coverage at HotHardware shows the a closer race between the NVIDIA beast and its competition: http://hothardware.com/Articles/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-480-GF100-Has-Landed/
Consoles are also more convenient. Turn it on. Put in a disc, or load a game off the hard drive. Play. Turn it off. Easy.
Then what's up with all this install patches business for specific games?
I got halfway through the first paragraph before I started looking for the link to the L4D2 benchmarks, which are a pretty good indicator of how well your computer is going to run L4D2, TF2, and very importantly, Portal2. None detected, even though it's one of their primary tests on all of their video card shootouts. Another failure for the guys at Tom's Hardware.
moox. for a new generation.
Will the Adobe CS5 Mercury Playback Engine run on this or are they really locking it JUST to Quadro's ?
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1258/15/
I discovered that the GeForce GTX 480 video card was sitting at 90C in an idle state since I had two monitors installed on my system. I talked with some of the NVIDIA engineers about this 'issue' I was having and found that it wasn't really an issue per say as they do it to prevent screen flickering. This is what NVIDIA said in response to our questions:
"We are currently keeping memory clock high to avoid some screen flicker when changing power states, so for now we are running higher idle power in dual-screen setups. Not sure when/if this will be changed. Also note we're trading off temps for acoustic quality at idle. We could ratchet down the temp, but need to turn up the fan to do so. Our fan control is set to not start increasing fan until we're up near the 80's, so the higher temp is actually by design to keep the acoustics lower." - NVIDIA PR
Regardless what the reasons are behind this, running a two monitor setup will cause your system to literally bake.
Yikes!
I already wasn't impressed, but after reading this it looks more like a fiasco, than just a mild disappointment.
Without putting too fine a point on it, hardware like this used to be pretty cool. I have had several GTX 260 and a Asus 4870 for the past 1.5 years. I've even got two M1710 laptops with SLI. Truth is, I've yet to really flex the muscles on *any* of this hardware since I've owned it.
There just aren't many Triple-A PC titles being made these days; let alone any that benefit much from hardware like this.
It would be very cool if there *were* such titles. But there aren't. Worse, there are not many coming into focus on the horizon, either. I suppose we can all hope the system requirements and eye candy in Star Wars: The Old Republic and in Diablo III will shine with this hardware.
But I wouldn't bet on it. So we buy one of these to play the Witcher II? Then what?
Hardware like this is a solution looking for a problem. And that IS the problem.
.Robert
For most gaming applications ATI ran away with this round in the price/performance category. For F@H though, I think this is going to be a very interesting card, Nvidia just folds better than ATI. There are numerous reasons for this, and finger-pointing is futile, but thats the cold hard fact. The extended time that software-side engineers have had to play around with CUDA seems to have been beneficial. In time, and with work on their OpenCL implementation, I think the current generation Radeons will catch up, but not for a while. I'm mostly interested in seeing how this card performs against the GTX 295, currently the best single PCB GPU folder. If the retail prices of the GTX 470, with its optimized CUDA Cores, stays within the $350-$400 range I'd love to pick one up to play with. Do not take this as an endorsement for either company. I simply choose the best hardware to fit my specific needs: ATI for gaming, Nvidia for F@H
Doom 3 was released 6 years ago, are you telling me that the PS3 and Xbox360 came out 6 years ago?
5 years ago, in a couple months.. (time flies)
Just bought a new gaming rig and went with ATI because nVidia didn't have a DX11 card. Probably would've gone with ATI anyways, but not supporting DX11 just put nVidia right out of the running.
Wait a second, your argument is that 3 consoles (including accessories) are as expensive as 2 gaming computers and therefore consoles are more expensive than gaming computers?
First of all, 3 Toyotas Highlanders are more expensive than 2 BMWs Z4s. Second, you can have more than one person play a console simultaneously, but you have to take turns on the gaming rig (or buy 2) -- like fitting more people in the Highlander. Finally, old consoles are fun (and cheap); old gaming computers suck at gaming.
First, I said that you can buy two good gaming systems over the same life span (which one good gaming system should last that just fine), AND have several hundred dollars left over. It costs roughly $2,500 for all three consoles and their controllers - that means on average, it's about $833 per system. For that money you can build a very nice gaming system that will last you several years AND do everything else that a computer can do. Then add in that console games are pretty much stuck at their $60-$70 price, where after a few months PC games are down to around $40 and after a year they're down to about $20, and it's way more expensive to go with a console. Also, you can re-install your old games on a new computer - if you want to play your old consoles, you have to keep a massive stack of consoles surrounding your TV, which is quite a hassle if you actually enjoy games and buy multiple consoles with each generation (I actually have a friend who has an NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, Wii, Atari 2600, Atari Jaguar, Xbox, Xbox 360, PS2, PS3, Sega Genesis with all the add-ons, Sega Dreamcast, and Segan Saturn all hooked up to one tv - it's quite a mess, especially with trying to keep track of what A/V switch turns on which consoles).
Secondly, due to game exclusivity, people rarely buy only one console - they buy a 360 for 360 only games like Left 4 Dead or Mass Effect, a PS3 for the PS3 only games, and then a Wii for Mario & Zelda games. If it weren't for the stupid exclusivity agreements, then they could at least buy just a Wii and then a 360 OR PS3 in order to play any game they might want.
I can play with a dozen people or more on my computer - it's this nifty new thing called "the internet".
Finally, old consoles are fun (and cheap); old gaming computers suck at gaming.
Old gaming computers play games from the time they were made just perfectly - just like how that old console plays games from when it was made just fine. Your only "argument" for why the old console is better is that for some yet to be defined reason, you dislike PC's.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson