The 4 way sli 480 is beyound most peoples budgets and even beyound the money no object people I've spent alot in recent years 4x 480 with water cool addon is a jaw dropping £1700 now i can build an entire system + screen that will do nearly the same fps if gaming was the only consideration 4way crossfire is only £1300 if were talking crazy people The highest graphics wise setup on here is somebodys 3way sli 480 and he compared it vs 3way crossfire The performance dif in most games was wether ati or nvidia had the better drivers 1-2 fps here and there and some games a single 480 or 5870 got better fps as the games did not support sli / crossfire.
I think people talk the Fermi down too much, admittedly it's hot, but unlike the P4s it could actually perform decently.
Especially since the GTX480 is now around £370 - which actually makes it relatively good value for money - much better than it was in any case!
EVERYONE IS FORGETTING that ati gpu's is at lease 6 months older than nVidia's cards and i think ati peform well for there age as they are sposed to be release new card sometime this year. So no surprise that nvidia has the best for performace with there cards. I buy from both gpu company.
That is only relevant if you're asking the question "Which company released a better product?" rather than "What should I buy?" On these forums, must people think the latter, hence why it hasn't been mentioned yet.
but nvidias chips are about the same age, the extra time was for problems on the production line that needed fixed.. infact they had to slow down there chips not speed them up in that extra time before release. If all had gone to plan and the release was much closer to ati release then we would have been looking at faster cards from nvidia than what we got. Makes your point irrelevant.
Just flipping through this (Haven't we had like five threads on the same thing, like, 6 months ago?) and couldn't help but notice what you point out is quite true... the GTX480 is a better card compared to the 5870 in most situations, yes. Pretty plain and simple. 5870 owner here saying so! But for a card that's $100 more, and four of it making $400 more... was I, as an ATI card owner, supposed to be surprised that the more expensive offering gave more performance? I mean, personally, I'd take the quad Crossfire 5870s and a tasty $400 SSD instead!
Actually Bakes, Fermi is the same gen as Ati's 58xx series. It arrived late, expensive, noisy and hot. Whats more, the nVidia range is still not complete... the 460 is out on Monday and will apparently sit above, just, the 5830 on performance but will compete (sic) with the 5850 on price! Meanwhile, Ati have a full range of DX11 cards out from £40 to £400 and have had the range 'complete' for about four months now. What's more, if rumours are true, they will be releasing their next gen in about 3 months time. nVidia should just have their Fermi gtx240 replacement out by then ...nice! "infact they had to slow down there chips not speed them up in that extra time before release. If all had gone to plan and the release was much closer to ati release then we would have been looking at faster cards from nvidia than what we got." Er, no Slizza, no! For Fermi to be as fast as pre release advertising the power draw and resulting heat issues would have resulted from several class actions from people whose homes burned down due to 512 shader induced fires!
That is not my point. Fermi being late might make the technical achievements of Cypress even more amazing, but in terms of 'what should I buy?' lateness changes nothing, as it is only performance, price, heat and noise, that change anything for potential buyers. Certainly, on heat and noise Fermi is not brilliant, but if you don't mind some extra heat, it's certainly not an awful alternative any more. At least the GTX470 is priced competitively now, between the 5850 and 5870. I've made plenty of assumptions here based on my own decisions. If I were buying a graphics card now I would be buying the one that offered the most performance for my budget, rather than the one that came out earlier.
Because the one that came out earlier, Ati, still offers the best bang for buck by a country mile without the power, noise and heat issues which cannot be just brushed aside like they don't matter. They are as much apart of the purchasing decision as the number of fps in Crysis. And as with most things in life, timing is everything. Those who adopted Ati's 58's early will have had the best part of a year with their cards before Ati ring the changes. Fermi adopters will only have had, at best, 6 months before the compromised gpu architecture of their choice is supplanted.
Besides the power advantage with the ATI, there is also the heat and noise advantage. I'd rather lose a few fps over the nVidia and have a quieter card and less heat in there.
Will this mass-debate ever end ?? You got to admit Fermi's sure given people something to talk about and talk about and talk about
*Snork* Seriously though, there will never stop being Nvidia vs ATI debates until one of them COMPLETELY fails, and manages to produce something high end that underperforms so badly that a budget card from the last generation would top it. And even then, people will claim that Nvidia/ATI are just biding their time, or that firmware updates will fix the issues, or that space monkeys from China are going to fling sparkly poo at the failing card and make it magically awesome or whatever arguments fanboys come up with these days. The truth of the matter as I see it, is that it's very unlikely that we are ever going to hit a graphics generation that perform identically in every game for the same amount of money, power and heat, or (slightly more likely, but still pretty improbable) a graphics generation where one competitor falls behind so badly on every front that it is a non-decision. People can always defend a card that underperforms and costs too much if it's quiet and cool. They can always defend a card that is too hot and costs too much if it provides more power. They can always defend a card that underperforms and is quiet and cool if it's cheap. And the thing is, they will always have a point.
It did not go according to plan, the amount of power leakage was not supposed to happen. I am correct, if all went to the plan perfect then we would have seen faster cards and at a time closer to the ATI launch. So..... Er,yes fingerbob, yes! EDIT: before today i did not realize fermi was the actual name of a nuclear power plant haha.
In fact I know a guy who works for Nvidia worked on the new cards and told me that not to buy the new gpu's because they will not be able to produce enought of the full fat 512 core gpus and that they had to cut the gpus back so they did not cook in your case. Which you have today out in the shops and until they change the manufactor process stay clear the only reson they release them now not in at the end of the year is because thet were loosing out to ati
No offence but this is bull. I could claim anything this way too. I think we established that some some cards are better for certain purposes then the other and that sometimes ATI holds the performance flag and sometimes it is Nvidia who wins. Call it a draw? The only real grudge I have against ATI is that they do not have too many applications that are optimised for GPGPU computing. If I want to use folding@home or any of hundreds of CUDA optimised apps then I can, whilst I'm still waiting for anything that ATI will run really nice. For this reason, Nvidia is by far the only choice for me, but who knows, maybe one day I'll be proven wrong... On the side note: It annoys me when people try to say we should compare GTX 480 to 5970. There's never any comparison, latter is dual GPU and in raw power it will always win.
Here you go: http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/cuda_apps_flash_new_uk.html# That gives you 242 so far if you filter only by application.
