GTX480 / GTX470 Reviews and Discussion

[notty22]

Those are just more excuses for ATI drivers, its all going to be better two releases from now. ATI fanbois were upset that a driver set released the day before Fermi launched (7th revision)was not used in the comparisons. GIVE ME A BREAK. Now your theorizing why Nvidia should have polished Fermi drivers, insane much ? You don't think ATI , tested its 5 series cards with its new features, eyeInfinity and dx11 instructions ?

 

[frozendarkness]

Wait since when? The new design wasn't finalized until a couple months ago, they've been rushing to get this stuff out the door.... that's hardly enough time to get their best drivers and gaming profiles ready..... look at what ATI has achieved through driver patches in the past 6-7 months. Lets say nVidia HAS been working on drivers for 3 months, ATI still has 3-4 months on them and they JUUUUUST released 10.3 which was a huge performance boost.

nVidia stuff is going to improve with drivers, likely significantly, I fail to see why anything else can be considered reasonable when ATI has done exactly that. Are nVidia driver engineers total idiots or something??

I think this is unknown. Nvidia has had the architecture, or should have had, since November when they were "first" going to release it. i do not know hwat happened in Nvidia internally and so do anybody else. Maybe ATI could release another great driver that bumps everything up significantly, I don't know, you don't know, nobody knows.

all i know is if i were nvidia and i were six months late to teh game, i'd make sure my drivers were top notch and not bottom crowd. The end-user is impotant, but these reviews are what gets the sales. I'm sure they'd much prefer to have a driver that beats the cards they're supposed to beat while keeping temperature down.

again, i'm guessing, but so are you. makes both of us look liek fools until what happens happens.

Also, when Nvidia releases tihs "magical driver" ATi will release a "new product" now i ask you is it more fair to compare the gt 480 to the new product or is it fair to compare it to the 5870. think about this carefully because the answer lies in the fact that the only point of comparison is now.

 

[L1qu1d]

You could say the same for any manufacturer then. The Delay Doesn't mean Driver Optimization it means time to develop the cards, and actually get them right. Didn't they run into how many production problems by Dec 09? Silicon Switches.

Give me a Break, I love how whent he 5870 came out every1 said you should see in a couple of months. Seriously Its getting pathetic.

I'm not fanboy but fanboys tick me off. Seeing only black and white. I give every card the benefit of the doubt.

That prob why I can appreciate both ATi and Nv.

That means since the 5970 took about a 2 months more to come out, it should be SUPER optimized compared to the 5870, which it wasn't.

Ever card has head room to improve. I think Nvidia was much more busy getting the cards out to Distributors, since they made such a pathetic amount so far.

These cards can't even meet quota, production has been pushed back and you're going to tell us, that they had time to optimize drivers?

Pass.


P.S

250 GTS is how old of a Rebrand? And drivers are still improving it and the 9800 GT, same goes with the 280s 285s, and ATI's 4000s. Please.

Plenty of time to optimize. I've used 9.11 drivers with my 5870 and it took till 10.3 beta to fix the artifacts in Serious Sam HD and the Water flickers to stop in BattleField 2 BC .

I've been right so far with my performance guess. We'll see what can change in 1 month. Ppl still think the 5870 will get more performance from Drivers...if that card can and this can't then I guess there must be something I'm missing.

 

[AMW1011]

Exactly, sorry but the whole "nVidia has had plenty of time, these drivers are mature" is complete BS. They have had 4 months with the card, MAX. The more plausible figure is <3 months, less than half the time ATI has had and they have just released their major performance driver.

No, it's exactly like L1qu1d said, these cards will be a completely different animal, performance wise, by the end of April or May. Expect to see the GTX 470 to be neck and neck with the 5870.

If you say otherwise then you are ignoring all facts and the history of EVERY SINGLE GPU RELEASE TO DATE.

 

[builderbobftw]

ATI fanbois were upset that a driver set released the day before Fermi launched (7th revision)was not used in the comparisons.

Yeh, Why should they use the fastest drivers from each company in order to get realy results, representating what people will use when they buy it?

Phhh....


EDIT: At Notty.

 

[AMW1011]

You could say the same for any manufacturer then. The Delay Doesn't mean Driver Optimization it means time to develop the cards, and actually get them right. Didn't they run into how many production problems by Dec 09? Silicon Switches.

Give me a Break, I love how whent he 5870 came out every1 said you should see in a couple of months. Seriously Its getting pathetic.

I'm not fanboy but fanboys tick me off. Seeing only black and white. I give every card the benefit of the doubt.

That prob why I can appreciate both ATi and Nv.

That means since the 5970 took about a 2 months more to come out, it should be SUPER optimized compared to the 5870, which it wasn't.

Ever card has head room to improve. I think Nvidia was much more busy getting the cards out to Distributors, since they made such a pathetic amount so far.

These cards can't even meet quota, production has been pushed back and you're going to tell us, that they had time to optimize drivers?

Pass.


P.S

250 GTS is how old of a Rebrand? And drivers are still improving it and the 9800 GT, same goes with the 280s 285s, and ATI's 4000s. Please.

Plenty of time to optimize. I've used 9.11 drivers with my 5870 and it took till 10.3 beta to fix the artifacts in Serious Sam HD and the Water flickers to stop in BattleField 2 BC .

I've been right so far with my performance guess. We'll see what can change in 1 month. Ppl still think the 5870 will get more performance from Drivers...if that card can and this can't then I guess there must be something I'm missing.

Your exactly right L1qu1d, the 5xxx series and the GTX 4xx series will take months to equalize to the standard neck and neck driver release pace they have been doing since the 3xxx series.

Again, expect a 10% performance gain with the GTX 4xx series over the 5xxx series in a month or two.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Those are just more excuses for ATI drivers, its all going to be better two releases from now. ATI fanbois were upset that a driver set released the day before Fermi launched (7th revision)was not used in the comparisons. GIVE ME A BREAK. Now your theorizing why Nvidia should have polished Fermi drivers, insane much ? You don't think ATI , tested its 5 series cards with its new features, eyeInfinity and dx11 instructions ?

I agree completely that Fermi's drivers are immature. I've also read some things from Charlie explaining why the tests are all over the place. Apparently, nVidia's yields were so low off of the wafers that they couldn't properly bin the chips and had to make do because they have so few of them. Instead of only picking "what works well" they had to just go with "what works" over "what doesn't". So while the chips used might all be within the spec that they have 480 shaders working with the voltage bump that nVidia was forced to do (which explains the heat from the leaky transistors and the high power usage) we might see anywhere from a 5-10% difference in performance from one card to another. This would seem to justify why no two review sites seem to have the same numbers. Drivers will help but it did take ATi 6 months to get their drivers where they are today and in 6 months when nVidia has their drivers at this level, ATi will be releasing their new "Southern Island" HD 6xxx series. At least, that's what's in the forecast.

CLICK THE LINK!:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=29594136&postcount=42

 

[builderbobftw]

Yes, The Nvidia drivers are immature.

But for every bump Nvidia gets, ATI will get the same bump.

 

[frozendarkness]

Exactly, sorry but the whole "nVidia has had plenty of time, these drivers are mature" is complete BS. They have had 4 months with the card, MAX. The more plausible figure is <3 months, less than half the time ATI has had and they have just released their major performance driver.

No, it's exactly like L1qu1d said, these cards will be a completely different animal, performance wise, by the end of April or May. Expect to see the GTX 470 to be neck and neck with the 5870.

If you say otherwise then you are ignoring all facts and the history of EVERY SINGLE GPU RELEASE TO DATE.

you are one dramatic person. that's all i can say. you can go ahead and buy stuff predicting the future, i'm just arguing that you shouldn't base your decision on supremacy based on stuff you are assuming. you don't have the facts. tell me do you work at nvidia and know how long they've had the card?

I don't. I hate conjecturing that's why i said there is no point in arguing about the future. you can only compare the now.

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

That's the thing, like SS says, they've had alot of time with this hardware in order to get these very small handful of selected launch day games up to snuff. None of these reviews are outside of the press guidelined games, so it's not like they cracked out a "Last Remnant" or "Postal III" or something that hasn't been on the radar since October or January's press launches. ATi and nV have had equal time to work on this (the beta was in November).
So what people are trying to say is that Unigine 2.0 works fine, but BFBC2 has issues that require driver rework? If true that would be more indicative of the focus than anything else IMO.

Still early though, and for that reason I want to see the performance in more non-traditional games. If all the games out there need performance drivers like the old FX5800/5900 did, then that's not a good thing either.

 

[notty22]

Driver optimizations also needs user feedback in large numbers with all the various pc configurations using the hardware and Game X. Theres Intel, AMD, Nvidia chipsets. At least 3 popular cpu configurations. Did anyone even test Fermi with a AMD rig ? Does anyone even use them anymore, lol Thats a joke, but there are bugs sometimes in one set of hardware and fully optimized in another.

 

[randomizer]

Remember, they only had 20 or so cards to test their drivers on over the last 6 months :lol:

 

[AMW1011]

Those are just more excuses for ATI drivers, its all going to be better two releases from now. ATI fanbois were upset that a driver set released the day before Fermi launched (7th revision)was not used in the comparisons. GIVE ME A BREAK. Now your theorizing why Nvidia should have polished Fermi drivers, insane much ? You don't think ATI , tested its 5 series cards with its new features, eyeInfinity and dx11 instructions ?

To be fair, the 5xxx series was really bad when it came to drivers on release, it was definitely rushed which was a great move for ATI, 6-7 months is a long time.

But that doesn't mean that the GTX 4xx series wasn't rushed at all when it came to drivers. I mean its not like they had anything else to worry about, such as horrible production rates, heat issues, yield problems, clock speed tweaking, extreme cooler designing, testing, analyzing, product placement, and just plain finalizing the cards in general (which, nVidia supposedly only finalized the shader and clock specs a month ago). Yep the driver department not only does not need a card to use to write the drivers, which only could have became available 3 months ago which is well before the specs were even finalized, let alone know the specs they need to be optimizing for.

Yep these drivers are totally mature, no erratic performance at all *cough BC2 cough*

I mean I have been one of the largest champions of the 5xxx series out and me and notty used to argue all the time about it, even today with PhysX, but even I can look at these cards rationally.

I guess this is the same as when people recommended the GTX 295 over the 5870 for the extra 10% performance from a dual GPU card for $100+ more without DX11.

 

[builderbobftw]

Nobody sane recommended the GTX 295 over the 5870.

Lose Power Effeciancy, Upgrade path, More heat, no DX 11 at not much faster.

 

[frozendarkness]

i'm just surprised that people argue drivers usually argue "this is new architecture so it'll take a while for drivers to mature"

than come back and argue "look at history". There is no history, Nvidia is treading new ground and all the power to them. I'll look forward to the next six months.

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

Those are just more excuses for ATI drivers, its all going to be better two releases from now. ATI fanbois were upset that a driver set released the day before Fermi launched (7th revision)was not used in the comparisons. GIVE ME A BREAK.

Difference is nVidia picks the launch date for Fermi (as it moves ever forward to the week after the week after next...), so for a paper launch when cards are available next week, you better test the latest driver from BOTH, but there's no excuse as to why nV's drivers aren't up to snuff at this moment other than they aren't up to snuff (seems you are pretty adamant about that the other way around), and this is a relatively new game, so both companies have had time to work with this.

Now your theorizing why Nvidia should have polished Fermi drivers, insane much ? You don't think ATI , tested its 5 series cards with its new features, eyeInfinity and dx11 instructions ?

Once again, I ask you, how and why nVidia was able to optimize for the even newer Unigine 2.0 benchmark, yet unable to optimize for such a big title as BFBC2?

Driver optimizations also needs user feedback in large numbers with all the various pc configurations using the hardware and Game X... but there are bugs sometimes in one set of hardware and fully optimized in another.

The game has been official for a few weeks, do you think those 10.3a drivers have this built-in experience you speak of?
And don't pretend that nVidia wasn't full of people running a bunch of these on a myriad of rigs. Everyone keep s talking about the vast superiority of nVidia's driver team, so it seems funny that you don't like the driver excuse for others, but are willing to use it yourself.

And if it's so far behind the competition due to bad drivers, does that mean you have to wait for each launch for new drivers before they will perform?

Seems like a double standard yourself that you criticized ATi for previously.

I don't doubt things will improve, but pretending the performance above isn't an issue regardless of whether or not it will improve with future drivers is ridiculous.

 

[Guest]

Personally from a logical point, I wouldn't get card only for strong tessellation power right now. I would get a cheap card something like a 5850 and wait a year THEN Fully Tessellated Games will come and Fermi Refresh with Faster clocks and lower TDP Vs ATI 6xxx, even the 480 is slow under Extreme Tesslation btw I dont see the point of getting a card only to be able to play Future games, no warranty on this one.

 

[L1qu1d]

Yes, The Nvidia drivers are immature.

But for every bump Nvidia gets, ATI will get the same bump.

Tell me how many bumps do u expect from a lets see Sept - April card for drivers? Lookin for a yearly contract or monthly

Yes the 5000s will get a bump as well, they still need optimizing especially in SS HD (Damn disgusting when I'm anywhere near water). We'll see some serious numbers.

Oh and the whole same bump thing doesn't work. If both the cards came out during the same month, I would say, yes both have equal chances of increasing frames. Remember 5000s have a reached a higher peak of maturity than the 400s, by how much, I dont know, though I would say alot.

I think ppl are to quick to judge something they dont understand yet. Seems like Video cardism. We've waited months for reference benchies, I dont think ppl will die waiting another half a month to a month until Nvidia Officially releases drivers for the 400s.

 

[AMW1011]

That's the thing, like SS says, they've had alot of time with this hardware in order to get these very small handful of selected launch day games up to snuff. None of these reviews are outside of the press guidelined games, so it's not like they cracked out a "Last Remnant" or "Postal III" or something that hasn't been on the radar since October or January's press launches. ATi and nV have had equal time to work on this (the beta was in November).
So what people are trying to say is that Unigine 2.0 works fine, but BFBC2 has issues that require driver rework? If true that would be more indicative of the focus than anything else IMO.

Still early though, and for that reason I want to see the performance in more non-traditional games. If all the games out there need performance drivers like the old FX5800/5900 did, then that's not a good thing either.

TGGA, I respect you the most when it comes to the graphics section of this forum. Your right, we don't know, but to say that there is nothing left for the GTX xx series to gain in comparison to the 5xxx series is what is annoying me.

And even you made a mistake, the longest they could have had a working Fermi architecture card is about 3 months since the A2 spin from what I've read. They surely couldn't have had the specifications finalized by then so it would have done the driver team little good.

Look here:

Yes, The Nvidia drivers are immature.

But for every bump Nvidia gets, ATI will get the same bump.

This has absolutely no backing on any form of fact, history, educated guess, or rational thinking.

Everything in the history of the GPU points to the falsity of this statement. Yes I am guess on the percentages, but I'm making an educated guess. There is NO WAY that this statement can hold true with nVidia not have working, finalized GTX 470s and 480s, not just the basic fermi die, for at least 5 months, assuming nVidia is a good deal better with drivers which certainly isn't my experience.

 

[Guest]

Why get a card with Strong tesslation righ now? To play future games? in what? 6 months? Fermi refresh and ATi 6xxx will be out by then lmao

And I am talking about fully tesslated games like Unigine as todays tesslated games are not even nearly 25% tessellated rofl That wont really show Fermis power in the near future and until new Generation comes out

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

Remember, they only had 20 or so cards to test their drivers on over the last 6 months :lol:

You forget they were also able to add about 2-5 per wafer as well.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Tell me how many bumps do u expect from a lets see Sept - April card for drivers? Lookin for a yearly contract or monthly

Yes the 5000s will get a bump as well, they still need optimizing especially in SS HD (Damn disgusting when I'm anywhere near water). We'll see some serious numbers.

Oh and the whole same bump thing doesn't work. If both the cards came out during the same month, I would say, yes both have equal chances of increasing frames. Remember 5000s have a reached a higher peak of maturity than the 400s, by how much, I dont know, though I would say alot.

I think ppl are to quick to judge something they dont understand yet. Seems like Video cardism. We've waited months for reference benchies, I dont think ppl will die waiting another half a month to a month until Nvidia Officially releases drivers for the 400s.

Well I can tell you that when the GTX 295 came out and thumped the Radeon HD 4870X2 there weren't doubts about it like there are about Fermi. The problem with Fermi is all the crap that's gone on. Now, it might be a mighty fine product, we all know that nVidia is capable of producing top-notch GPUs, they've been doing it for over a decade. What concerns me is the fact that nVidia had so many problems with production and of course there is also this:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=29594136&postcount=42

Not to take a cheap shot at nVidia (not that they don't deserve one) but for your sake L1QU1D, I'd sit back and see what happens first. You've shown us all that you're a really cool guy and I'd hate to hear that you got screwed.

 

[L1qu1d]

No they wont. Not with this Economy.

Nv is just putting out their mainstream and low end of june, I dont think we'll see more until Xmas.

Look at 8800 GTS 320s, they still rock the our socks, and thats what? 2006?

 

[builderbobftw]

Prehaps funnier than the Way It's meant to be Grilled photo?

 

[Guest]

http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/1957/gpuo.png


Prehaps funnier than the Way It's meant to be Grilled photo?

Wow fatty Bacon seems to like the Fermi core :lol:

The 8800 series is just a guess, who would think they will still performe? Its all guessing, I am sure when people bought it they didn't know that the next generation cards will be based on the same performance.