Hardware Nvidia GeForce GTX 470 1,280MB Review

@wuyanxu: My guess is that 98% of people will NEVER use CUDA applications, so it's a non-feature for me. PhysX? Yeah, great... every game has that right. If you consider how much extra it's going to cost you to run a GTX4 card in terms of electricity, plus a case upgrade if you don't have an Antec 1200 or TJ07 (as you *WILL* need a high airflow case), as well as living with the high-speed fan, I think it's starting to look exceptionally poor for value. Add that it's >6 months late to market, not conclusively faster than the HD5 series (the GTX480 should be ahead of the 5970 given the extra development time, which it absolutely is not) and the fact that AMD will probably drop prices of the 5870/5850 when the nVidia cards are actually available to buy off the shelf and, in my eyes, you have a clear flop. Don't get me wrong, I'm no ATI fanboy, but I think it's very very hard to defend nVidia with Fermi.

 

It has been fairly obvious for a while that this generation for nVidia was going to cause them problems but I never considered it was going to this bad, no way in hell I would consider putting one of this series of cards inside one of my rigs.

 

On a random note anyone else notice this, apparantly my calenders wrong:
We’ve waited ages to get out hands on Nvidia’s first DX11 graphics cards – even the product announcement made back in September 2010 was late

 

These really a joke considering. Nevermind. I've been nvidia since my 8800gtx that's still going strong and dabbled with the 4870x2s and 5870s on launch. Looking at driver support now I would be inclined to believe that maybe I should switch back to ati. Nvidias drivers are far from brilliant at the moment and I have not updated my 295s drivers for months as support has been horrendous. I'm selling the cards and buying a 5970 as the dream pm custompc made proved that a single 5970 is roughy as quick as a pair of 295s anyway. Gives me the opertunity to purchase a 5870 to crossfire with it or another 5970 should I want to. Nvidia have lost custom here in excess of £1000 a year from me, more fool them!


Andy

 

@NickCPC.
i used to own gtx260 before getting 5870, and CUDA/PhysX features are very noticeable: video scrolling is not as smooth as on nVidia; Just Cause 2 doesn't look as good with explosions; NFS Shift crash doesn't feel as fatal without the debris; haven't played BatmanAA in ages, but it is a lot less immersive without PhysX effect.

i think it was the hype that made people expect too much, i've always expected GTX470 to be about the same as 5870, and GTX480 to be 20 to 30% faster, but a lot slower than 5970 which is a dual-GPU solution. both GTX400 are performing as expected, with driver tweaks to come.

don't get me wrong, im not a fanboy of either camp, i go for good deals (5870 for £234, yes please) but i do feel 470 at same price as 5870 is justified after seeing bit-tech's Dx11 benchmarks.

 

I have no favourites with either brand. But I regret selling two cards 8800GTS 512mb and my last one the ATi4890 which was so smooth in games and photoshop even the resource eating CS4.

But I made a good decision in getting the 5870 instead of waiting for the nVidia. First time where my patience has paid off.

 

wow, my 88 trio run crysis faster then that. most displeasing.

 

On page 11.... (the only page I've looked at)

"the entire bit-tech office though Crysis would run spectacularly"

.... and....

"HD 5870 nor the GTX 470 couls play Crysis smoothly"

Fermi.... an irritating disappointment so far for the gaming community. Hopefully the GPU computing side of things will be significantly better.

 

Such a pity that the latest from nVidia does not live up to the wait. I really hope their next attempt is better as competition in the market is a good thing for us consumers.

In the meantime I'm perfectly happy with my 4970 watercooled.

 

I'm so undecided as to what to do, I want to upgrade from ATI 3870X2 to a DX11 card. I dont want to get ATi's 5000 series as I want a more compute orientated architecture with MIMD as this is the way of the future. Fermi's architecture is the way to go but their thermals on this generation are too high.
So I guess I'm just going to wait it out till the end of the year and ATi's 6000 series or Fermi2.
Another big decider for me will be how much (if at all) ATi's newley announced game developer support takes off. While I agree that open solutions are the best way to go I'm just sick of announcement's and nothing more.
If it can't be seen that these open standards for physics etc are being actively taken up by developers then I will jump ship to Nvidia...proprietary stuff is better than nothing at all.

 

I think we now have a new difinition of Clinically insane, someone who could buy a 5870 but buys this instead....

 

First all, I don't know where you all are standing (physically) but the 470 is at LEAST $50 cheaper than the 5870 (really, check newegg). It is in the price point between the 5870 and the 5850, and generally is much closer in scores to the 5870, which it sometimes beats, than the 5850, which it always beats.

And as for saying that the 480 (a single-GPU card) should beat the 5970 (a dual-GPU card) do you know anything about gfx cards at all? They're not even in the same class; nVidia has yet to put out a card that is in competition with the 5970.

Say what you want about the temperature and power consumption, those are legit issues to be concerned about. Maybe they will be addressed in subsequent driver releases, but who knows. But in terms of performance, compare the right cards please? And do some freaking research before you talk please, it helps your points.

 

-Less performance (Dirt 2 being the only real exception)
-More power
-More heat

Justified how?

 

Not really, the 5870 basically owns in Crysis except at one resolution, They're neck and neck in Bad Company and Dawn of War (but something looks fishy about the latters fps results so I don't want to trust it) the GTX 470 only wins in Dirt 2 at lower resolutions and the 5870 wins out in stalker

I don't really see why you'd buy the GTX 470 apart from for folding, and for CUDA and PhysX although I'm skeptical as to whether they're as 'immersive' as people say, most of the time you probably won't notice a massive change in gameplay environment

 

look at 1920x1200 AA playable performance:
-Dx11 Dirt2 4xAA, gtx470 about the same
-Dx11 STALKER, always favers ATI, so it's slower
-DoW2 4xAA, 470 about the same, with higher minimal FPS
-Crysis: 8x and 4x AA not playable. noAA, 5870 won, i'll give you that
-Dx11 BFBC2: 4xAA gtx470 higher minimal FPS but still neck and neck for general performance.

and that's how i concluded that for most Dx11 games gtx470 is able to match 5870 usually with higher minimal FPS, therefore based on added features of CUDA and PhysX, it is able to justify asking for same price as 5870.


waiting for bit-tech's Fermi architecture in-depth look on tessellation and see whether nVidia's approach is really better than ATI's one tessellation processor. Fermi have the danger of filling up all shader units with tessellation, thus slowing down; while ATI have the problem that in extreme tessellation, it's bottlenecked by the single processor, less flexible.

 

I want to know, why does fermi perform so badly considering the number of stream processors it has? I thought it should have no problems outperforming ATI if more stuff = more performance.

Also, I think you guys are being a bit unjustified about GTX470. The fact is, it is competitive in performance and is priced accordingly. 2nd, to answer people saying why buy this over ATI, what is the point? Well, fermi will allow game devs to make heavy use of tessellation. If and when that ever happens, then ATI will be left behind in the dust. Fermi cards will be an order of magnitude better.

 

I just thought I'd mention that a couple of sites have reported that when running Dirt2 in DX11, the Fermi cards switch to DX9. Not sure if this is a driver issue, but would help explain the greater performance over the 5800's in what is usually a ATi-centric game. If it is a driver problem, you could try to rerun the Dirt2 test or try running it in DX9 and see if the performance changes at all.

Sources:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/geforce-gtx-480,review-31846-9.html
http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/03/23/nvidia-bends-definition-honesty-gtx480-benches/

 

My how things have changed. Everybody loved the dx 10 8800 gtx when it launched, Ati had no response what so ever. Now the tables have turned, Nvidia 6 months late with a dx11 gpu give us under performing, hot, noisey, power hugry, expensive gpu's, very dissapointing.

 

@ Clive,
According to Charlie Demirjian, the new Geforece 4800 series cards do not render DX11 high definition ambient occlusion in Dirt 2, and they do not render AA in Battle Forge 2.Can you confirm that?