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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."
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.
Ryan Fenton
Prescott at its hottest (Pentium 4 HT 571) was only 115W, which is about the same or (in some cases) vastly less than nearly every mid-range to high-end GPU today.
Radeon 5830 is 175W
Radeon 5850 is 151W
Radeon 5770 is 108W
Prescott at its hottest actually used less power than some of the current high-end Core i7 CPUs (i7-920 is 130W), although of course that's comparing a 1-core CPU to a vastly faster 4-core CPU.
What's happened is that CPU coolers have gotten much better (thanks in part to heatpipes and larger fins/fans), power supplies have gotten more efficient and larger, and cases are better ventilated. The result is that today a 130W CPU is no big deal, whereas with the Prescott it caused all kinds of thermal nightmares for people building their own PCs (professionally engineered commercial PCs generally fared OK with Prescott).
Still, 250W on a GPU is stupid. Even with modern efficient air cooling, it's hard to keep such a GPU cool without making a ton of noise. Add the crazy power supply requirements (most people are recommending 550W or more, which means $100+ if you want a quality PSU), and it's a pretty big burden. The real problem is that the ATI card is almost as fast, cheaper, and 80 watts cooler. And it's been on the market for 8 months.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
You're missing the best card on a performance per watt basis, the HD5750. The Powercool Go!Green edition pulls 62W max, 52W in normal gaming. It's so efficient it doesn't even need a PCIe power cord. It will get you 95% of the performance of the HD5770 pulling twice as much power. Oh and for HTPC's that are on 24x7 the 14W idle is nice too =) Now if only they would come down from $160 and Newegg would get them back in stock...
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
I think I read somewhere (I'd have to look it up) that both ATI and nVidia make other models.
Maybe you could find one that's more to your liking among those ?
OTOH, with summer comes the season of open case barbecues, so nVidia has at least something going for it !
(is the GF100 dishwasher safe ?)
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Exactly; it's barely on-par with the months-old HD 5870, and it gets taken to school by the 5970. I love when AMD wins.
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
The previous gen. NV Cards don't do DX11, thus where running this bench in DX10 mode. Which is kind of a misleading thing for THG to do, while they explained it in the text they should have made seperate chart for those two modes to make it clear on thirst glance. There is a comparison of image quality in Unigine Benchark (DX10 vs. DX11) out there somewhere, and the difference is night and day.
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.
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.
I'm not sure but I've seen pics first in dx10 then in dx11 and it added some nice visuals alot more detail in the texture of things like stairs out of bricks with some of them misaligned instead of perfect rectangles and alot of detail on the dragon statue. In fact here dx9 dx10 dx11 comparison
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