f13.net

Tonight the Fermi NDA has dropped, and the first "official" benchmarks are starting to get published.

First impressions for the GTX 480, as far as I found them, are:

The Good: Fastest single-GPU card, somewhere slightly below the 5970. DX9 performance comparable to 5870, DX10 about 10-20% better, DX11/Tesselation 20-30% and more ahead of the 5870.

The Bad: High power draw (about 150W more than the 5870 in 3D, higher power draw than a 5970!), high temperatures (93°C under load, compared to the 70ish load temps of the 5870), quite loud (figures I've seen range from 45-60+ dB under load) - http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-480,2585-15.html

The Ugly: Paper launch, after all this time. Costs $100 more than the 5870 - prices start around $500.

Overclocking seemed to be easy enough with a 480 for some decent improvement: http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-470-480-review/33 . 470 is not that different: http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-470-480-review/34

They got the performance crown back, but is the price worth it? It'll also be interesting to see how Tesselation develops from here and whether it becomes a mandatory feature, because if so they have clearly beaten ATI there. For today's crop of games, it probably comes down to personal preference. And as for PhysX, CUDA and 3D Vision, we'll have to wait and see how they fare. To me, personally, this feels like a let down. It probably couldn't have been different after all the wait, but still, this is 2010 and we're 6 months past Cypress.

Feels rushed.

I guess I'll be waiting for a die shrink to get that power consumption under control.

I guess it was to be expected, but does a 20-30% gain in DX11 Tesselation justify $100 more, 150W more and 20-30 degrees hotter than the 5870? I'm not seeing it. Nvidia has a tradition of their first generations of a chipset being too hot, too expensive and too powerhungry. On the other hand, the cards are normally head and shoulders above the pack, so its cool to sit back and wait for the mid to high range cards to come out. In this case, the equivalent mid to high range would be a currently available 5870.

Unfortunately, ATI recently released a statement that they aren't going to drop prices on the 5000 series any time soon. With Fermi what it is, they don't really need to. Hopefully at least now that Nvidia has a comparable card out, the 5000 cards will at least drop back down to MSRP.

I've only read a dozen or so reviews, but it seems the 480 is about equal to the 5870, HardOCP had them a bit up and down from each other in most games (Metro 2033 was a clear nvidia win). But holy hell the 480 put out a lot of heat and noise, and sucks down power. The 480 SLI beats the 5970 handily, but for $1000 and needing a 1200 watt power supply I'd hope so.

Just an FYI, Anandtech's ad host was serving compromised ads the last couple days. A lot of people that read the Fermi review there were infected. I was running adblock+ and noscript, doesn't seem to have bothered me.

The latter is probably why ATI didn't drop the prices. If they dropped the prices, most retailers would probably just run them at the old MSRP anyway.

Firefox warned me of that as I have that featured turned on.