GeForce GTX 480 And 470: From Fermi And GF100 To Actual Cards!

Features

Benchmark Results: 3DMark Vantage

It might come as a bit of surprise to you that Vantage favors the Radeon HD 5870 over Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 480, and perhaps less of surprise that the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970 and GeForce GTX 295 cards take first and second place. However, bear in mind that Vantage is a DirectX 10-class synthetic metric. While many of our readers like to see these numbers, they’re not necessarily representative of real-world performance.

Also bear in mind that we’ve disabled PhysX support here. Synthetic though this test might be, there’s clearly a huge weighting given to this capability, and we’re measuring graphics performance here.

Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini is an Editor Emeritus at Tom's Hardware US. He edits hardware reviews and covers high-profile CPU and GPU launches.
444 Comments Comment from the forums
  • restatement3dofted
    I have been waiting for this review since freaking January. Tom's Hardware, I love you.

    With official reviews available, the GTX 480 certainly doesn't seem like the rampaging ATI-killer they boasted it would be, especially six months after ATI started rolling out 5xxx cards. Now I suppose I'll just cross my fingers that this causes prices for the 5xxx cards to shift a bit (a guy can dream, can't he?), and wait to see what ATI rolls out next. Unless something drastic happens, I don't see myself choosing a GF100 card over an ATI alternative, at least not for this generation of GPUs.
    Reply
  • tipoo
    Completely unimpressed. 6 months late. Too expensive. Power hog. Performance not particularly impressive. The Radeon 5k series has been delivering a near identical experience for 6 months now, at a lower price.
    Reply
  • tpi2007
    hmmm.. so this is a paper launch... six months after and they do a paper launch on a friday evening, after the stock exchange has closed.. smart move by Nvidia, that way people will cool off during the weekend, but I think their stocks won't perform that brilliantly on monday...
    Reply
  • not at all impressed
    Reply
  • Godhatesusall
    high power consumption, high prices along with a (small, all things considered) performance edge over ATI is all there is. Are 100$ more for a gtx 480 really worth 5-10% increase in performance?

    Though the big downside of fermi are temps. 97 is a very large(and totally unacceptable) temperature level. IMO fermi cards will start dying from thermal death some months from now.

    I just wanted competition,so that prices would be lower and we(the consumers) could get more bang for our buck. Surely fermi doesnt help alot in that direction(a modest 30$ cut for 5870 and 5850 from ATI and fermi wont stand a chance). It seems AMD/ATI clearly won this round
    Reply
  • Pei-chen
    Wow, it seems Nvidia actually went ahead and designed a DX11 card and found out how difficult it is to design. ATI/AMD just slapped a DX11 sticker on their DX10 card and sells it as DX11. In half a year HD 5000 will be so outdated that all it can play is DX10 games.
    Reply
  • outlw6669
    Kinda impressed :/

    The minimum frame rates are quite nice at least...
    Lets talk again when a version with the full 512 SP is released.
    Reply
  • djtronika
    yawn
    Reply
  • The way we're meant to be dismayed, gg infirmi
    Reply
  • randomizer
    I'll keep my GTX275.
    Reply