Thoughts on Nvidia 480GTX and 470GTX

Remove all ads!

I personally don't like these cards. The performance gains are good but the price isn't worth it as you can get a 360GTX for around or less $200. Not only that but the new cards require a very good PSU and are not any faster than the ATI 5850 or 5870. If I had money to put down on a new GPU it maybe ATi 5850.

As for drivers, that is where Nvidia shines; they just need to fix there power requirment issue and pricing with the new cards. Besides that they aren't that bad and perform nicely.

 

You must have missed the little driver problem last month that was messing up with the cooling and making Nvidia cards blow up left and right

 

Does either of those cards present a step forward in reducing the die size...or a completely redesigned architecture? Or are they just beefed up 360GTX's?

I haven't followed anything Nvidia has put out in the past few years....

I am so throughly impressed with the ATI HD 5000 series, that Nvidia can suck a poisoned egg for all I care. (My 5850 is F***ING sick! )

 

You're... completely off, Kitrax.

Fermi is the new architecture NVIDIA has been working on for years now. Shame that it looks badly like a flop, with that power consumption.

The GTX480 is as a single card as powerful as anything ATI has out now, and in a SLI the most powerful thing out on the market.

It's also $500 and needs a 650W power supply. Whoopsie.

 

A single GPU card the consumes more power than ATI's top-end dual-GPU card? What the hell were Nvidia thinking? As far as performance goes I'm not that impressed, the HD 5970 still outperformed the 480 on a few games. Sure the 480's single GPU and it is the most powerful GPU on the market but that doesn't mean much if it ends up consuming more power...

 

Well...it might save you money on energy bills since it could probably heat an entire 1200sq ft home.

Taza, like I said, I haven't been following Nvidia at all. Was the 3xx series the "beefed up" versions of the previous generation then?

 

Kit, that won't be too useful in summer

From what I can tell the 3xx series are more like rebrands than beefed up versions, similar to the 8800 GT -> 9800 GT. Even if this is the case though I've no idea which naming corresponds to which card. Nvidia are devious like that

 

Eh, it's good that nvidia does something else than rehashing their old cards. They get the Fermi power consumption down and they could well have another 8 series in their hands.

... as it is it's more like FX series, though.

 

First off a few things.

Nvidia new cards are new and not beefed up 200 series cards. The only 300 series cards are for Notebooks.

The new cards are using the same die size as the 200 series cards. This means they will use more power until Nividia finds a way to shrink the die.

ATi has an edge in high end GPUs because their cards consumer less power and they have a smaller die for thier GPU, which are related to each other.

As for Nvidia vs. ATi; I personally prefer Nvidia overall for their drivers. I find ATi more concern with hardware than software for their GPUs. If ATi could get their drivers working as good as Nvidia 85% of the time I would buy an ATi GPU.

 

Are you sure? From what I can tell the G xxx are the mobile cards and the GTX xxx are the desktop ones. There are G 200 mobile cards as well as the regular GTX cards, so I assumed the same applied to the 300 series.

 

If resellers tell the truth they will sell Ati cards to the big public.

Only a handfull of people ares going to buy one of these two cards for a bit more tessalation and physics. Just like only a handfull got an ATI 2000 series unless it was on sale.

Nvidia had a huge driver problem recently. It fried a lot of cards.

 

Well, nice lie.

The driver problem had the potential to fry cards, yes, that's why it was pulled. However, it did not fry a lot of cards.

Also, nvidia still doesn't have ATI's incessant driver problems, which is why I'm still using nvidia. And waiting for them to produce something that's better than what I have now and worth buying.

 

It is ironic, but an add for new ati drivers is located above this box.

Difficult to stay out of a flameware when even here Nvidia and Ati fanboy/girls meet. I owned a 9800, 1600, 2600, 3870, 4870 and had only one issue years back with sacred2. Obvious were my loyalty lies.

On topic. Those two cards are not it. They use more power, cost a lot more and the increase in framerate will not be noticed in most games. Nvidia says they are desinged for high temp around 100 celsius. We know more after a while. Will they melt like a lot of mobile GPU's did, or not. Still impressive devices. In this niche market the money is not made.

If nvidia gets the medium cards right they are back on top of the sales food chain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpZXhR1ibj8&NR=1

 

Asking someone pick Nvidia or ATi is like asking someone if they want Chocolate or Vanilla ice cream. There is always one specific flavor someone prefer for one reason or another.

I personally prefer Nvidia. I have had better luck with Nvidia. Right now they don't have the hardware to go along with their software.

As for ATi; I just never had luck with their hardware or software performing at optimal levels.

 

You always got to take the brand you want. If nvidia works for you keep it.

The video was extra funny since I understand the German he speaks. After a die shrink they will perform much better.

 

From the benchmarks I've seen, the GTX480 and 470 are simply not good enough to have a clear win over any ATI 58xx. They cost too much, consume too much power, and are too noisy. The GTX470 is priced somewhere halfway in between the 5850 and the 5870 and can only claim a small performance increase over the 5850, while the GTX480 is priced at around the 5970 level, with which it simply cannot compete. I don't care if it's the fastest single GPU card in existence, if it's priced close to a dual GPU card that absolutely destroys it in benchmarks, guess which I'm going to choose?

And while ATI drivers may have been poor in the past, they have made big steps in the past year in this regard and so far I've got nothing to complain about for my 5850. On the other hand, nVidia always used to deliver good quality drivers, also for Linux, but have stumbled a bit in recent times and I don't see them having an unambiguous win over AMD/ATI at the moment in the run for drivers.

Overall, I'd say ATI is where I'd go shopping right now, if I was looking for the right price/performance ratio. And in fact did when I bought my 5850 last month. I don't see the value of sticking to one manufacturer when they certainly can't always deliver the top product all the time. All of my previous cards have been nVidia (TNT2, GeForce4 Ti4200, 7600GT), but I don't have any kind of particular attachment to nVidia and am now thoroughly enjoying my 5850.