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."

Comments

Bleeding edge isn't usually worth it

[NotSoHeavyD3]

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.)

Re:Bleeding edge isn't usually worth it

[tirefire]

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)

Crysis came out in Q3 2007. It's not really a current game anymore. Its use as a benchmark for video card performance is frustrating because it's an incredibly inefficient game engine. Don't get me wrong, it looks beautiful... but so do games that will run at twice the frame rate on the same system.

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.)

Right on. This is what I used to do until spring of 2007, when I bought an nVidia 8800 GTS 320 MB to play STALKER. That card continues to serve me well with any game I throw at it. I was expecting to need to upgrade it in 2009, but I never did... new games kept running great on it. I've had that card for almost exactly THREE YEARS now and it still amazes me. I've never had any piece of computing hardware that did that.

Changes in graphics card features and speed were really taking place at a white-hot pace between about 2003 and 2007. Those years saw the introduction of cards like the Radeon 9800, the GeForce 6800, and the GF 8800. All of those cards totally smashed their predecessors (from both nVidia AND ATI) in benchmarks. It was even more amazing than the CPU world from 1999 to 2004, when clock rates where shooting through the roof and when AMD embarrassed Intel with the introduction of the 64-bit hammer core (Athlon 64).