NVIDIA GeForce 480 – 6 months to Play Catch-up

Wow, what a disappointment. After all the NVIDIA-spewed hype about beating down ATI when their DX 11 cards were finally out, the reviews are finally in on the brand new NVIDIA 480 and 470 cards and I’ll save you the trouble of reading every single review out there like I just did:

NVIDIA’s GeForce 480 performs the same now as the ATI 5870 did 6 months ago.

There, look at all the time I saved you… no, that’s not right. I’ll include some examples of what i mean. Before I continue though, I’ll clarify two things so you can read through the reviews faster:

• ATI Radeon HD 5970 is an SLI-esque dual-chip solution on a single board.
• We are ignoring all 480 SLI and 5970 performance numbers, I’m only interested in how a single GeForce 480 performs against a single ATI 5970 — if you have too much money, feel free to build out some insane system, but just double all the framerates you see to get an idea of what that will get you.

1. TIE: HardOCP’s Bad Company 2 numbers: Average FPS is almost identical between the two boards at maxed out resolution on maxed out settings. There is a slight difference between the CSAA/AA tech being used and if that minor discrepancy will keep you up at night, by all means freak out and vent. For our purposes, there is no visual difference during gameplay so we don’t care.
2. TIE: Hexus.net Bad Company 2: What’s with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 outperforming the brand new 480 in some high-resolution cases?
3. NVIDIA BETTER: Hardware Canucks Far Cry 2: With everything dialed out at max resolution, the 480 actually beats down the ATI card by about 20 fps:
4. NVIDIA BETTER: Legit Reviews STALKER Call of Pripyat: At 1920×1200 resolution the 480 eeks out 10fps over the ATI part here.NOTE: In the AnandTech review, they only registered a 4fps gap between the cards, which would nullify this win for NVIDIA. We are giving them the benefit of the doubt here though.

   

5. TIE: AnandTech Dirt 2: 480 actually pulls out 4 extra FPS here, but I cannot declare that a “win”, I need 8 or 10 FPS or more. If you are so anal that 4fps will actually seriously impact your buying decision when considering a $100 gap between the two cards well… then there was a 4fps gap and the 480 wins, so have fun:
6. TIE: AnandTech Crysis Warhead: Just like the benchmark with Dirt 2, the NVIDIA 480 pulls 3fps higher in this benchmark too:

So that gives us 4 TIES and 2 NVIDIA WINS where there was a difference of 10fps or more. While we didn’t compare every game from every review out there, we thought we got a good cross sampling of games with sexy-ass graphics that you would want to run smoothly.

Conclusion

There is a $100 price difference between the new NVIDIA GeForce 480 and the 6-month old ATI Radeon 5870 that performs so similarly. We saw TIES in most titles, or performance gaps that were small enough for us to consider them ties. Only in very few games did we see the new NVIDIA GeForce 480 provide a performance gap worth noting and even in others we still saw the ATI 5870 ahead.

Given all that data, there is no way I could recommend buying an NVIDIA GeForce 480 over an ATI Radeon 5870. Even as a bit of an NVIDIA fanboy, I’ve never owned non-NVIDIA graphics hardware, I still don’t see the $100 justification given the performance numbers they are turning in.

For anyone that wants to upgrade and CAN WAIT, either wait for ATI’s refreshed card for the fall OR wait another 6-months for NVIDIA’s refreshed part if you really want to stick with NVIDIA hardware.

For anyone that wants to upgrade and CANNOT WAIT and are ON A TIGHT BUDGET, buy the ATI Radeon 5850. It is $100 cheaper than the 5870 which is $100 cheaper than the new GeForce 480. There is a performance drop of about 10-15% however, so be aware of that (this recommendation is for the budget-minded).

For anyone that wants to upgrade and CANNOT WAIT and APPRECIATE VALUE, buy the ATI Radeon 5870. Like we said before, we just aren’t see the performance numbers from the GeForce 480 to justify the $100 premium over this card.

For anyone that wants to upgrade and CANNOT WAIT and HAS TONS OF MONEY, buy 2x ATI Radeon 5870′s and put them in a CrossFire configuration (make sure your motherboard supports it). Normally we would recommend just buying the 5970 (which is an all-in-one CrossFire setup already) but they seem hard to find for some reason.

We hope we’ve summed up all those mess of reviews for you and you can make an informed decision now. For what it’s worth, I’m still on an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS on a dual-core 3.0Ghz E6850 w/ 8GB of RAM and I’m pretty happy. There is certainly room for improvement, but I tend not to get excited about graphics card upgrades until the 2nd-fastest cards on the market are routinely providing a 2x speedup in performance AND I have a game that I’m playing that I feel like I’m missing out on graphically on the PC.

Right now I’m playing a shit-ton of Left 4 Dead 2 (VS Mode) and really that doesn’t need a beast-graphics card. If I pick up Just Cause 2 for the PC however, I might change my tune quick.

Other Thoughts on the GeForce 480

Another thought is… cooling… the cooling on this thing is killer-weak-sweet:

When building a new PC I typically keep in mind where the heat I’m pulling off a device is going, and I think you should consider that heavily here as well. This thing is likely going to create enough heat that you’ll want it in a large medium or fullsized ATX case with plenty of ventilation right off the side of the card and out of the case.

I wouldn’t recommend you stick this in some compact case like a Shuttle and just because it fits call it a day — it will likely make things very uncomfortable for your hard drives and mobo.

Another thing is the power this thing is going to suck down. I’d make sure you don’t have any bullshit PSU and actually spend some money on a nice one (we love Seasonic, Corsair, PC Power and Cooling – there are plenty of good ones out there. Just don’t skimp).