Hardware Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 1,536MB Review

Thanks for the great review.

 

Theres nothing quite like having your cards in the wild tho to gather knowledge on your own product. Whats 6 months over a 2 year development cycle? Cypress spent 2 years from drawing board to factory line, and the tail end of that would have been working up to production steppings, with largely similar earlier steppings to play with and create drivers for. Never seems to mean that release drivers are up to much bar being functional, certainly has not changed in recent times with any product from any company. By your line of reasoning any card on release should be 95% max. performance and the rest is game profiling and bug fixing over the life of the product. Doesnt happen that way tho., ever........

 

Argh, I wish this had been better - otherwise, it won't push the price of the 5870 down at all...

 

Yep your review hits the mark, the other sites i also read say the 470 is a no go the 5870 is still best bang for buck across the board.

But still it might be worth a re-look a few months after some driver tweeks hopefully the prices will have settled and we'll see if the Nvidia are burning themselves and/or systems out

 

Given the card is about as fast as the 5870, it does deserve the 9/10 for performance.

It's not a flop because of performance, it's a flop because it accomplishes the same performance while using 100W more, costing $100 more, and coming out six months later..

 

So for anyone not owning nvidia stock or is so concerned about their epeen that the F@H points make this worth it, it looks pretty clear that the 4xx series is off to an average start at best.
The numbers would be great if it was £50-100 cheaper and didn't use obscene amounts of power. Oh and wasn't really loud while still sitting dangerously close to 100c in games.
And once the 5890 or whatever the higher clocked re-spin of the 4870 is called is out and should match the 480, there's even less reason to get excited.

But then again, unless i come into significant money im not in the market for any £300+ card right now. How will the derivatives play? The chip size and power consumption don't bode well for a cheap to make, small £100-120 card.

 

Finally the GTX 480 is out (nuclear reactor to power it sold separately). This card is AWESOME as it allows you to play games and BBQ at the same time. Now I know why Nvidia was so quiet, they were drowning in oven mitts while bench testing this portable heating system.

I'm disappointed in Nvidia as I was expecting a superior product so ATi would cut the HD 5870 prices in half. 90 c and 380 Watts at load is HORRIBLE while ATi is cooler and uses way less electricity with about the same performance level. Matter of fact just overclock a HD 5870 until your lights go dim and your case starts to melt and I'm sure you will blow a GTX 480 away.

Drivers will make the GTx 480 faster but the heat and electricity is an issue, Nvidia gets a front page story on EPIC FAIL magazine.

 

$499 is about £335 using direct conversion. I know our prices include tax but £85?

 

Give a month or two when better drivers are out and the price drops from the always inflated launch prices. Who knows, with the new architecture their could be some nice improvements when they get the drivers right. Look how much ATI was able to pull out of the bag recently. Over all tho very disappointing, but at least it isn't far behind performance wise.

 

this + their latest driver problems (fan speeds?) make it easy for customers.

but hey. I still got the 8800GTS 320MB card (G80) so I can just about buy anything these days and get awesome performance in games.

Also seems like NVIDIA only cares about GPGPU these days. It was said before the launch that the architecture was mainly suited for GPGPU tasks and seems like it holds up after seeing these performances in games.

Smells like Bad management all over. They might as well just drop out of the consumer market and exclusively sell Quadro and Tesla products.

Also those buying Adobe Premiere Pro and wants the Mercury playback engine will have to buy a NVIDIA card. So in that case there really is no choice. Photoshop seems to be using more generic OpenGL acceleration so works with ATI cards as well.

 

Actually it is cheaper to get a GTX 480; Think about the money you'll save on energy bills during the cold winter.
You can turn on F@H, turn off the central heating, sit back and relax.
Especially gaming elderly people should consider one. The governement should endorse Nvidia GTX 480. Very efficient 2 in 1 solution....

Really disappointed with the features (Heat, noise and especially the price which really is too high). And I was planning to get the full 3D bundle kit ......sad

 

Ironic for the green team up make a ungreen card... this'll no doubt add to global warming in many ways...

 

AnaTech presented CUDA, Physics and Folding@Home GPU.. the only place where this GPU excel greatly.







It looks like an ideal Quadro GPU rather than a gaming Geforce GPU?

 

exactly, so i figure even if driver issues only increase performance 4%, their next-gen GPUs will be better because they will be able to lower power use and/or increase performance with new knowledge.

 

But by that time ATI will be looking to release their next gen. GPU's...

 

and maybe next time around things might be different. Who knows. Do you have a magic crystal ball that can see the future.

 

What Earthly justification could you have for wanting 4GB of VRAM in a single card? It's like pairing 1GB of RAM with a 9400GT (i.e. pointless).

 

Nvidia were aiming for the top spot and they failed to achieve it, And they were aiming for the top spot, no matter what fan boys may say.
Every new generation of Nvidia cards one of the first ones has always been aimed at the "best card" position, this time they failed, simple as that.
They've now got a card that cost's £100 more than the ati rival, not good.

 

The design was pulled from a design they originally intended for what it's best at; GPU compute. It would fundamentally never be a truly gobsmackingly amazing graphics chip for this reason alone.