Updated: Nvidia GTX 480 Reviews & Discussion

Abarbarian

Abarbarian

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"Switch to STALKER: Call of Pripyat and the scores for Nvidia are as bleak as the game's post-apocalyptic levels. While STALKER games have tended to favour ATI hardware in the past the gap in performance between GTX 480 and HD 5870 is significant, with the HD 5870 at least ten percent faster than the GTX 480 at every resolution. The HD 5850- a card which is about half the price of the GTX 480 - isn't too far behind the GTX 480 either. This is despite Call of Pripyat making extensive use of DirectX 11 features such as tessellation which the GTX 480 is supposedly designed for. While we have admittedly not tested with 4x or 8x anti-aliasing due to STALKER’s very high performance requirements, it’s disappointing to see the GTX 480 come up so short."

"Power consumption at idle was the highest we’ve seen from a single GPU card at 186W system power draw, 18W more than the HD 5870. At load though it entered a whole new dimension for a single GPU card sucking down a massive 382W while looping the canyon flight demo in 3DMark 06. That’s a full 106W more than the Radeon HD 5870 in the same test, 30W more than the dual GPU Radeon HD 5970 and only 6W less than the dual GPU GeForce GTX 295!"
"The result is a graphics card that runs extremely hot at full load, and that coupled with the unique external heatsink it could easily be rebranded the GTX 480 Griddle Edition"

"The bad news continues. Nvidia has chosen to launch the GTX 480 quoting a price thirty per cent higher than that of its direct competitor. While you can find a HD 5870 1GB for around £310 in stock without too much effort, the GeForce GTX 480 1,536MB will hit e-tailers shelves on April 6th at an MSRP of £420 ($450). Even if you value the Nvidia exclusive features like PhysX, 3D Vision and CUDA support, such a high price will be tough to stomach."

Looks like ATI cards all round then for the moment unless you live by a hydro-electric power station in Iceland
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http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2010/03/27/nvidia-geforce-gtx-480-1-5gb-review/1
 
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I forgot the link to the source but I have included it now.

Jocking apart it looks like an expensive hot running power hungry card. still it is the first of the breed and it may turn out to be better than it looks at present.
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I read a few of the reviews and it's generally agreed it runs hot and juice hungry but outperforms anything else on the market.

It also supports 3D and PhysX which ATI cards do not.

However, for most users (that means me) best bang for the buck, as our colonial cousins will say, has to be the ATI 5 series.

Some folk support AMD/ATI as the underdogs. Back in 2002, leading ATI cards cost more than their Nvidia rivals, it's never black & white ;)

No major manufacturer is in the business for any other reason than to take your money from you.

They probably thrive on buyers arguing amongst themselves and I'd imagine encourage competition.

Me, I just go with what works best for the money, for I realise one Director/Shareholder/CEO is much the same as another, and also realise that businesses do very well on misguided loyalties :)
 
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