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Graphics Upgrades Hardware

Nvidia's GF100 Turns Into GeForce GTX 480 and 470 132

Posted by timothy from the that-nda-must-have-been-awfully-heavy dept.
crazipper writes "After months of talking architecture and functionality, Nvidia is finally going public with the performance of its $500 GeForce GTX 480 and $350 GeForce GTX 470 graphics cards, both derived from the company's first DirectX 11-capable GPU, GF100. Tom's Hardware just posted a comprehensive look at the new cards, including their power requirements and performance attributes. Two GTX 480s in SLI seem to scale impressively well — providing you have $1,000 for graphics, a beefy power supply, and a case with lots of airflow."
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Nvidia's GF100 Turns Into GeForce GTX 480 and 470 More

Nvidia's GF100 Turns Into GeForce GTX 480 and 470

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  • $1000 for graphics (Score:5, Funny)

    by tpstigers ( 1075021 ) on Friday March 26, 2010 @11:00PM (#31636556)
    Come on - is that all? There HAS to be a way I can spend 5 times that to play a video game.

    • Just wait for the dual-PCB cards. Quad-SLI, anybody?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z34107 ( 925136 )

      Come on - is that all? There HAS to be a way I can spend 5 times that to play a video game.

      TFA suggested purchasing two of these $500 cards, three $400 120Hz monitors, and a $200 NVIDIA stereoscopic vision kit. That'll let you game in 3D across three 1080p monitors.

      So, you can spend $1400 in accessories to match your $1000 cards. And then, you know, buy the rest of the computer. Not quite five times more, but I'm still salivating over getting my hands on such a setup some day...

      • TFA suggested purchasing two of these $500 cards,

        What? Only TWO? Where's my quad SLI? Where's my more-money-than-sense option? Where's my burn-people-to-death-with-my-air-outtake option?

        • Your dreams of incandescence for wayward travelers in your home or office would have been nicely facilitated by a quad CPU Tejas [wikipedia.org] workstation. You might have needed three-phase power, ear protection, and an asbestos suit, but that's just the price to pay to be a True Hardcore Gamer.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by crossmr ( 957846 )

      Sure, I'll sit in front of your machine and stop you from playing it until you pay me $4000.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Well, you could simply declare that multiple monitors is for losers and get a QuadHD (3840x2160) LCD instead, like say this one [westinghousedigital.com]. It's only supposed to set you back 50,000$ [engadget.com] or so. A 2160 cinema projector can easily set you back a few hundred thousands if that's not enough. There's always options if you have enough money...

  • Expensive, power hungry? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Megahard ( 1053072 ) on Friday March 26, 2010 @11:03PM (#31636572)
    Sounds like the GF100 turned into the MRS100.

  • Fermi needs a refresh or v2 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Artem S. Tashkinov ( 764309 ) on Friday March 26, 2010 @11:05PM (#31636580) Homepage
    To summarize Fermi paper launch:
    • Fermi is a damn hot and noisy beast
    • Fermi is more expensive and only slightly faster than the respective ATI Radeon cards, thus DAAMIT will not cut prices for Radeons in the nearest future
    • Punters will have to wait at least for two weeks for general availability
    • Fermi desperately needs a reboot/refresh/whatever to attract masses

    It seems like NVIDIA has fallen into the same trap as with GeForce 5XXX generation launch.

    • Point #3 is misleading. "Paper Launches" are common in the industry. It's not an nvidia or fermi-specific thing.
      Point #4 is just bogus. There will be plenty of people who'll buy these chips.
      Also, prices are likely to fall on these chips, which will cause Radeons to fall as well. And it's not going to take that long.
      I suggest everyone go check out HardOCP's GF100 review for a real-world analysis, rather than 4 trollish bulletpoints.

    • No, I wouldn't compare this to the 5xxx at all. Especially considering the Nvidia cards whoop the Radeons in tessellation and geometry operations.

      Not to mention the overwhelming lead Nvidia has with GPGPU currently.

      • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

        by binarylarry ( 1338699 )

        Nvidia also has decent drivers.

        ATI's drivers are horrifyingly bad.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by JuniorJack ( 737202 )

        Not to mention the overwhelming lead Nvidia has with GPGPU currently.

        We are using GPU's for a number crunching tasks - integer operations. Currently one 5970 (aircooled) outperforms
        a computer with 4 x GTX 295, watercooled and overclocked to 725 Mhz each.

        NVIDIA has to do really much better with those new cards to win us back

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Fred_A ( 10934 )

          Not to mention the overwhelming lead Nvidia has with GPGPU currently.

          We are using GPU's for a number crunching tasks - integer operations.

          And the CPU is busy computing the OpenGL the screensaver graphics ? :)

          I know the GPUs have now moved into a different realm altogether but I still find it strange at times.
          I still see my graphics card as a glorified Tseng ET 4000 despite it probably having more processing power than most of my previous machines combined...

        • There is a significant difference in architecture between the two units. If all you are doing is integer operations, then the Radeon will be faster indeed since it contains more execution units.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by im_thatoneguy ( 819432 )

      Maybe. But that assumes that your GPU is just being used to render DX or OpenGL games.

      I think Nvidia made a very wise business decision with Fermi. Right now there is NO DEMAND for a video card on Fermi's level. All of the popular games run at full quality in full HD with AA. There is no "Crysis" which nobody can run at a decent framerate. We've sort of plateaued at "Good enough" since most games are cross developed for consoles (which are running aging video cards) and PC. Both AMD and Nvidia hav

      • Re:Fermi needs a refresh or v2 (Score:5, Informative)

        by MartinSchou ( 1360093 ) on Saturday March 27, 2010 @07:50AM (#31638728)

        In the AnandTech review the GTX400 is 2x-10x faster than the GTX 285 or Radeon 5870.

        That's overstating it WAY too much.

        In certain benchmarks the GTX480 is quite a bit faster than the 5870, but what you're saying is that it is across the board, which is just not true. From the conclusion of the AnandTech review:

        To wrap things up, let's start with the obvious: NVIDIA has reclaimed their crown - they have the fastest single-GPU card. The GTX 480 is between 10 and 15% faster than the Radeon 5870 depending on the resolution, giving it a comfortable lead over AMD's best single-GPU card.

        There is a massive difference between "10 to 15%" and "2x-10x faster".

        • Yes. If you take one sentence out of context that's overstating it. But let's do a real job of quoting what I said:

          Both AMD and Nvidia have released gaming cards that are overkill. So Nvidia has decided to take a different tact. They've managed to release a gaming card that is competitive with the very best video card for gaming and also redesigned their cores to be fast GPGPUs.In the AnandTech review the GTX400 is 2x-10x faster than the GTX 285 or Radeon 5870.

          The paragraph break was perhaps unwarranted but my entire post was about OpenCL performance. In OpenCL benchmarks the GTX480 is significantly faster. The word I used to describe their DX and OpenGL performance was "competitive" as in "comparable" as in 'around 10-15%'

          The point is DX and OpenGL performance is sort of a moot point at present. Either card is adequate for just about any game yo

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        Well, honestly I don't quite get this card. It's either a much cheaper Quatro or it's an overpriced, hot gaming card. It's six months after the Radeon 5xxx series launched, I wouldn't be very surprised if between this paper launch and actual availability AMD has binned up and announces the HD5890 to go head-to-head with nVidia for the title of fastest single gaming card again. Also AMD has managed to roll out a full series top-to-bottom of 40nm cards already, while I think nVidia will take a lot longer to t

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Suiggy ( 1544213 )

        In the AnandTech review the GTX400 is 2x-10x faster than the GTX 285 or Radeon 5870.

        You were looking at GTX 480 SLI which means that it's two GTX 480s. A single GTX 480 is only marginally better than an HD5870 in the majority of benchmarks, and costs $100 more to boot. A crossfire HD5970 system would out perform a GTX 480 SLI system. I guess you also haven't heard of Metro 2033, STALKER: Call of Prypiat, or Shattered Horizon, all of which are very demanding games. And there will be more demanding games out later this year (Rage, Deus Ex 3, Crysis 2). I'm calling you a troll.

        • You were looking at GTX 480 SLI which means that it's two GTX 480s. A single GTX 480 is only marginally better than an HD5870 in the majority of benchmarks, and costs $100 more to boot. A crossfire HD5970 system would out perform a GTX 480 SLI system.

          No I was looking at the GPGPU benchmarks (OpenCL and CUDA). The GTX 480 was 8x faster at raytracing than then than GTX 285. The GTX 285 was faster than the 5970 in all of the benchmarks by a good margin. So we can assume that the lead would be even greater in the raytracing test if it was OpenCL.

          If you even skimmed my post you would have correctly read that I dismissed OpenGL and DirectX benchmarks as irrelevant at present and was simply talking about GPGPU capabilities.

          I guess you also haven't heard of Metro 2033, STALKER: Call of Prypiat, or Shattered Horizon, all of which are very demanding games. And there will be more demanding games out later this year (Rage, Deus Ex 3, Crysis 2). I'm calling you a troll.

          Metro 2033: Everything at max @ f

      • Well you sissies... Let me throw a full-scale realtime global illumination renderer at that thing, and see how well it fares THEN! ^^

    • And what about OpenGL? It's completely useless without OpenGL support.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Suiggy ( 1544213 )
        GTX470 and GTX480 will support OpenGL 4.0 when it ships in a couple of weeks. AMD/ATI released their OpenGL 4.0 drivers for HD5000 series cards yesterdya.

    • Hey, you missed some!

      -Fermi excels at Tessellation (which isn't used in any current games)
      -Fermi is great for GPGPU computing!

      They did say this generation was going to focus more on scientists... about 5 months ago.

  • That there are a lot of lunatic performance enthusiasts and deep-pocketed GPU computing users out there. $500, 250 watts, only modestly faster than the competitor's cheaper, cooler card that has been out for some months now, and has variants and cut-downs spanning more or less the entire price/performance spectrum from sub-$100 to mid $400s...

    One cannot deny that they are, in fact, the fastest; but in all other respects they just got owned. More power draw than a CPU from the bad old days of Prescott(and

    • Re:Nvidia can only hope... (Score:5, Informative)

      by RzUpAnmsCwrds ( 262647 ) on Friday March 26, 2010 @11:25PM (#31636734)

      More power draw than a CPU from the bad old days of Prescott

      Prescott at its hottest (Pentium 4 HT 571) was only 115W, which is about the same or (in some cases) vastly less than nearly every mid-range to high-end GPU today.

      Radeon 5830 is 175W
      Radeon 5850 is 151W
      Radeon 5770 is 108W

      Prescott at its hottest actually used less power than some of the current high-end Core i7 CPUs (i7-920 is 130W), although of course that's comparing a 1-core CPU to a vastly faster 4-core CPU.

      What's happened is that CPU coolers have gotten much better (thanks in part to heatpipes and larger fins/fans), power supplies have gotten more efficient and larger, and cases are better ventilated. The result is that today a 130W CPU is no big deal, whereas with the Prescott it caused all kinds of thermal nightmares for people building their own PCs (professionally engineered commercial PCs generally fared OK with Prescott).

      Still, 250W on a GPU is stupid. Even with modern efficient air cooling, it's hard to keep such a GPU cool without making a ton of noise. Add the crazy power supply requirements (most people are recommending 550W or more, which means $100+ if you want a quality PSU), and it's a pretty big burden. The real problem is that the ATI card is almost as fast, cheaper, and 80 watts cooler. And it's been on the market for 8 months.

      • Re:Nvidia can only hope... (Score:5, Informative)

        by afidel ( 530433 ) on Saturday March 27, 2010 @03:07AM (#31637652)
        You're missing the best card on a performance per watt basis, the HD5750. The Powercool Go!Green edition pulls 62W max, 52W in normal gaming. It's so efficient it doesn't even need a PCIe power cord. It will get you 95% of the performance of the HD5770 pulling twice as much power. Oh and for HTPC's that are on 24x7 the 14W idle is nice too =) Now if only they would come down from $160 and Newegg would get them back in stock...

        • Where do you get the 62W max figure for that card? AMD's spec for that GPU is an 86W TDP. Is it underclocked?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by afidel ( 530433 )
            It's a non-reference design using a superior voltage regulator module and it slightly undervolts the core and has no cooling fan to power. Here's [techpowerup.com] the charts.

  • Crap Hardware vs. Crap Drivers? Is that it atm? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So I can choose between nice 20W idle with ATI, but shit windows and goddamn awful linux drivers with only outdated X.org / kernel support for the cards.

    Or this power hungry overpriced heater (yay, summer is coming), which at least has decent drivers.

    The Free Market has failed us! Damn commies!

    • I hear the ATI proprietary drivers are great as long as you don't wanna run anything newer than the 2xxx series...

      And there are of course the nouveau open source drivers, whose 3d acceleration is best paraphrased as "maybe someday. stop asking dammit."

      Yeah, it's pretty much Nvidia or something from someone else circa 2007, take your pick.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Fred_A ( 10934 )

      So I can choose between nice 20W idle with ATI, but shit windows and goddamn awful linux drivers with only outdated X.org / kernel support for the cards.

      Or this power hungry overpriced heater (yay, summer is coming), which at least has decent drivers.

      I think I read somewhere (I'd have to look it up) that both ATI and nVidia make other models.
      Maybe you could find one that's more to your liking among those ?

      OTOH, with summer comes the season of open case barbecues, so nVidia has at least something going for it !
      (is the GF100 dishwasher safe ?)

  • So... (Score:5, Funny)

    by RyanFenton ( 230700 ) on Friday March 26, 2010 @11:07PM (#31636616)

    Most unique, perhaps, is that the surface of the card is actually part of the heatsink, above the fin array. Normally, this would be a part of the card you could grab onto when pulling it out of a system. But when I burnt my hand on it, I thought a temperature reading would be interesting. Turns out that, during normal game play (running Crysis, not something like FurMark), the exposed metal exceeds 71 degrees C (or about 160 degrees F).

    ...So, are any third party manufacturers planning on making an easy-bake oven attachment for this thing? At least have that thing creating some gaming snacks with some of that extra heat.

    Ryan Fenton

  • What do you know, heaters for PCIe come with moderately fast GPUs onboard these days!

  • Anand Tech Review (Score:5, Informative)

    by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Friday March 26, 2010 @11:34PM (#31636802)
    There's also an Anand Tech [anandtech.com] review which is pretty good and has plenty of different benchmarks. It has the added benefit of testing a 480 SLI configuration which produces some interesting results. It also presents some benchmarks that help to show off nVidia's GPGPU performance as well, which is something that they've been using to hype these new cards.

    In my own opinion, ATI still has a competitive advantage, especially considering that they can always drop their price if they feel threatened. nVidia is lucky that they have the ION and Tegra to fall back on, because it doesn't seems as though they don't have a pot to piss in right now in terms of high-end desktop graphics offerings. The 480 seems to be about equal to similarly priced ATI offerings and doesn't give them the edge in performance that they're accustomed to having.

  • Bleeding edge isn't usually worth it (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NotSoHeavyD3 ( 1400425 ) on Friday March 26, 2010 @11:38PM (#31636820) Journal
    I mean look at it like this. You can probably get a card for $120-$150 now that will probably run every current game well right now. (Well except for Crisis) So there is no point in buying it for current games. You could get that $500 card hoping that it will run future games well but it never seems to happen that way.(They're slow no matter what old card you have.) Instead you can just buy another $120-$150 card in a few years and that one will run it well. (This way you end up spending less money and actually get better performance.) So my experience is just buy a decent card ($120-$150) and in a few years buy another one and do whatever with the old one. (Sell it, give it to a family member whatever.)

    • For most people, yes. Some people like to be on the bleeding edge however.

    • Re:Bleeding edge isn't usually worth it (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tirefire ( 724526 ) on Saturday March 27, 2010 @02:00AM (#31637442)

      I mean look at it like this. You can probably get a card for $120-$150 now that will probably run every current game well right now. (Well except for Crisis)

      Crysis came out in Q3 2007. It's not really a current game anymore. Its use as a benchmark for video card performance is frustrating because it's an incredibly inefficient game engine. Don't get me wrong, it looks beautiful... but so do games that will run at twice the frame rate on the same system.

      So my experience is just buy a decent card ($120-$150) and in a few years buy another one and do whatever with the old one. (Sell it, give it to a family member whatever.)

      Right on. This is what I used to do until spring of 2007, when I bought an nVidia 8800 GTS 320 MB to play STALKER. That card continues to serve me well with any game I throw at it. I was expecting to need to upgrade it in 2009, but I never did... new games kept running great on it. I've had that card for almost exactly THREE YEARS now and it still amazes me. I've never had any piece of computing hardware that did that.

      Changes in graphics card features and speed were really taking place at a white-hot pace between about 2003 and 2007. Those years saw the introduction of cards like the Radeon 9800, the GeForce 6800, and the GF 8800. All of those cards totally smashed their predecessors (from both nVidia AND ATI) in benchmarks. It was even more amazing than the CPU world from 1999 to 2004, when clock rates where shooting through the roof and when AMD embarrassed Intel with the introduction of the 64-bit hammer core (Athlon 64).

      • I'm still using my GeForce 8800 GT 512MB card as well.

        Still, I'd like to find something for under $300 that runs a lot faster without being a space-heater.

  • New hardware is good (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sarten-X ( 1102295 ) on Friday March 26, 2010 @11:48PM (#31636918) Homepage
    I love seeing new generations of hardware come out. It means that the perfectly adequate cards from two years ago will be even cheaper.

  • hello Nvidia GrillForce (Score:5, Funny)

    by distantbody ( 852269 ) on Friday March 26, 2010 @11:52PM (#31636948) Journal
    It's about time a product acknowledged my desktop grilling needs.

  • Another review here points to slightly more of a performance edge to the GTX 480 and 470:
    http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=888 [pcper.com]

  • These new cards, as usual, are way too expensive. I had the best video card when Doom3 came out. Since then I've upgraded once, and need a whole new motherboard, CPU, and RAM before I can upgrade to a newer card. This is why people turn to consoles. This is what's killing PC gaming. I really hope on-live works out, as I see it as the ultimate solution to this problem without having to resort to an xbox/ps3.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by linzeal ( 197905 )

      Doom 3 was released 6 years ago, are you telling me that the PS3 and Xbox360 came out 6 years ago?

      I don't know what your priorities are for computing needs but you are on Slashdot and your telling me you do a refresh every 6 years or so?

      I'm paid to do CAD for a living so I need a beast at home to do work on but I could not imagine a 6 year old, what an original Athlon or P3 could even handle 1080p streaming content, let alone any hardcore programming environment for compiling or a modern parametric modeler.

      • Doom 3 was released 6 years ago, are you telling me that the PS3 and Xbox360 came out 6 years ago?

        5 years ago, in a couple months.. (time flies)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by anss123 ( 985305 )
      You don't have to get the absolute best ya know? OnLive - a youtube like gaming service - is unlikely to give you a better gaming experience than a $70 graphic card. If you got to have the absolute best graphics out there then the PS360 is already getting long in the tooth and MS/Sony is fretting more about their Wii inspired controllers than graphics these days.

    • Well what on earth are you buying the new cards for? Last year's mid-range cards are far cheaper and perfectly adequate for any game around (especially if you run at console-standard 720p). Also, if you last upgraded in 2004 - you'd be needing a new console by now anyways. Not many games released for the PS2 or Xbox lately.

      On-Live will be ok for slower-paced games (latency kills any FPS playing), but you'll need a fairly beefy connection if you want even console-level resolutions, let alone PC-level. Plus,

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Totenglocke ( 1291680 )

      And you know who buys the top of the line super expensive cards? Pretty much no one. Everyone else either buys a mid-range card or last years top of the line. Both of those will last you a few years and the all around computer cost is less than a console.

      Don't believe me that consoles are more expensive? I'm a PC gamer (who occasionally plays console games) and a friend of mine is a console gamer (who occasionally plays PC games). He tries to use your argument about "it's expensive with upgrading your

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by bertok ( 226922 )

        And you know who buys the top of the line super expensive cards? Pretty much no one. Everyone else either buys a mid-range card or last years top of the line. Both of those will last you a few years and the all around computer cost is less than a console.

        Don't believe me that consoles are more expensive? I'm a PC gamer (who occasionally plays console games) and a friend of mine is a console gamer (who occasionally plays PC games). He tries to use your argument about "it's expensive with upgrading your computer", yet he ignores the fact that 1) console games virtually never go down in price, where PC games drop in price very quickly after the first few months and 2) Consoles nickel and dime you to death. We actually sat down and did the math one time and for his Wii, 360, PS3 and enough controllers for 4 players on each, it came out to over $2,500 for just the console hardware. You can easily buy two very good gaming systems for less money over the course of the lifespan of a console generation.

        So no, people don't turn to consoles because they're cheaper, people turn to consoles because they can't do basic math.

        Actually, people do buy the super expensive cards, and it's often not a bad deal.

        I got myself an NVIDIA GTX8800 when it just came out. It ran super hot, cost me quite a bit, but it was the fastest single-card/single-chip 3D accelerator on the market for something like a year, and even when faster cards came out, the difference was something like 10% for a long time.

        In the end however, it was cheaper for me to buy a very good card once and keep it for a couple of years, than to repeatedly buy older model car

      • And you know who buys the top of the line super expensive cards? Pretty much no one.

        Then why can't supply satisfy demand? Prices on all the enthusiast-oriented cards have been going up for months, and if you really want a top-end card (5970 for example), it's really hard to find one.

        Monitors are getting bigger and cheaper, and a lot of people want to play at (minimally) 1900x1200 at high settings. For newer games that takes expensive cards.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by PhunkySchtuff ( 208108 )

        We actually sat down and did the math one time and for his Wii, 360, PS3 and enough controllers for 4 players on each, it came out to over $2,500 for just the console hardware. You can easily buy two very good gaming systems for less money over the course of the lifespan of a console generation.

        So you can buy two PCs (that can have one, or at most two people playing at once) or you can buy three consoles and enough peripheral hardware to have four people playing at once on each console and... consoles are more expensive?

        Consoles are also more convenient. Turn it on. Put in a disc, or load a game off the hard drive. Play. Turn it off. Easy.

        • Consoles are also more convenient. Turn it on. Put in a disc, or load a game off the hard drive. Play. Turn it off. Easy.

          Then what's up with all this install patches business for specific games?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sa1lnr ( 669048 )

        And don't forget the price of the games.

        Here in the UK PC games are a standard £30/35 Sterling and have been for years. A lot of console games that I see in the stores are up to and above 50% more expensive.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kf6auf ( 719514 )

        Wait a second, your argument is that 3 consoles (including accessories) are as expensive as 2 gaming computers and therefore consoles are more expensive than gaming computers?

        First of all, 3 Toyotas Highlanders are more expensive than 2 BMWs Z4s. Second, you can have more than one person play a console simultaneously, but you have to take turns on the gaming rig (or buy 2) -- like fitting more people in the Highlander. Finally, old consoles are fun (and cheap); old gaming computers suck at gaming.

        • First, I said that you can buy two good gaming systems over the same life span (which one good gaming system should last that just fine), AND have several hundred dollars left over. It costs roughly $2,500 for all three consoles and their controllers - that means on average, it's about $833 per system. For that money you can build a very nice gaming system that will last you several years AND do everything else that a computer can do. Then add in that console games are pretty much stuck at their $60-$70

  • I want (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    a 40nm 9800GT with 80W TPD. The 9800 is fast enough for my needs and has been for 2 years now. Less heat. Less power. Less noise. A 150W video card has absolutely no appeal to me.

    • I'm surprised that there's even a market for 80W GPUs. Most computer sales are now laptops, with handhelds catching up quickly. In a laptop, you have maybe 10W, 20W if you're on mains, in a handheld you've got under 1W for the CPU and GPU. Given the kind of performance that we're seeing from the current generation of GPUs on ARM SoCs, which use about 500mW, 80W seems extravagant.

      • 80W seems extravagant.

        The Dell XPS 1730 (SLi 8800GTX) comes with a 230W power supply. :S

        There will always be someone who wants to pay for the privilege of the best graphics, and a lot of mates are now forgoing the shuttle cases and buying a decent GPU laptop.

        That said, I have CURRENT i7 desktops with power supplies with 230W power supplies.

    • Maybe they'll call it GTS 450 and sell it for $180?

  • Crippled double precision, bleh. (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The only real reason I wanted to get a Fermi / GTX480 card was to experiment with GPGPU and finally be able
    to work at reasonable performance using double precision algorithms which my 8800GT won't do.
    Now I find that they've crippled the double precision performance to something like 1/4th the hardware's actual capability
    just to price gouge the developers that want that capability as opposed to just playing video games.
    So as it stands the AMD 5870 is about 2/3rds the price or so and has 4x the double precisi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by RCL ( 891376 )
      I'm also eager to run my GPGPU code on that, but since it uses single-precision floats only, I'm OK with NVIDIA's decision.

      People still think about cards in terms of "traditional" graphics API. DirectX 11 bleh... These days, you can again render pixels your own way, and rasterization and polygon-based graphics API can be completely bypassed... without losing performance!
    • I'm guessing that they want to sell you the $2000 top of the line Quadro FX card to do your number crunching, or the Tesla.
  • I think Fermi can be summed up with the comments near the bottom of the Crysis Warhead benchmark in the review done by AnandTech. "The GTX 400 series completely tramples the 5000 series when it comes to minimum framerates, far more than we would have expected. " Fermi is a mac truck that ploughs though the tougher scenes. There is nothing worst than having smoke, explosions, and water falls etc causing graphics spikes.

  • All their boasting cannot obscure that. Nvidia has nothing this market round. Maybe they will be back in the game next round, but only if they can moderate their arrogance and stop lying to their customers. Otherweise it looks like Nvidia may be going to be history with regard to the consumer market.

    I certainly will not buy from them again after 2 failed GFX cards (the bump problem) and 1 failed mainboard (much too much heat), both from shoddy engineering on their part. It also seems that they have lost the

  • Per subject, what would be a reasonable card for playing with GPGPU tech (under Win7)? I have been thinking about the GT220 or GT240, and while I am bombarded with reviews by Top Elite gamer sites indicating that these are low to mid range cards, as far as I can tell they basically do what the higher range cards do, but with fewer cores/less memory/slower clock. And the only significant thing I might be missing out on is double precision arithmetic.

    Of course, I am likely to be wrong... what else would I not

    • When CUDA came out I went and bought the cheapest GPU I could find (30 euro GeForce 8400 GS) and started learning. If you've never done GPU programming before (like me) and you just want to give it a go, better get the cheapest card to start with. You can always sell it and buy a better card once you get proficient at it (or just keep them both, which is what I did, for multiple GPU jobs at once). I use Linux, but the same should apply to win7 (assuming Nvidia has drivers for the card, which I assume they d

  • The coverage at HotHardware shows the a closer race between the NVIDIA beast and its competition: http://hothardware.com/Articles/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-480-GF100-Has-Landed/ [hothardware.com]

  • No source engine benchmarks? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Hadlock ( 143607 ) on Saturday March 27, 2010 @08:09AM (#31638838) Homepage Journal

    I got halfway through the first paragraph before I started looking for the link to the L4D2 benchmarks, which are a pretty good indicator of how well your computer is going to run L4D2, TF2, and very importantly, Portal2. None detected, even though it's one of their primary tests on all of their video card shootouts. Another failure for the guys at Tom's Hardware.

    • It doesn't matter. Any of these tested cards will get you more than 100fps even at high resolutions in Source games.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Just about any card above $100 will run all of Valve's games maxed out. Benchmarks that show Valve's games are pretty pointless.

  • Will the Adobe CS5 Mercury Playback Engine run on this or are they really locking it JUST to Quadro's ?

  • 90 degrees C, at Idle!! (Score:5, Informative)

    by guidryp ( 702488 ) on Saturday March 27, 2010 @09:52AM (#31639464)

    http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1258/15/ [legitreviews.com]

    I discovered that the GeForce GTX 480 video card was sitting at 90C in an idle state since I had two monitors installed on my system. I talked with some of the NVIDIA engineers about this 'issue' I was having and found that it wasn't really an issue per say as they do it to prevent screen flickering. This is what NVIDIA said in response to our questions:

    "We are currently keeping memory clock high to avoid some screen flicker when changing power states, so for now we are running higher idle power in dual-screen setups. Not sure when/if this will be changed. Also note we're trading off temps for acoustic quality at idle. We could ratchet down the temp, but need to turn up the fan to do so. Our fan control is set to not start increasing fan until we're up near the 80's, so the higher temp is actually by design to keep the acoustics lower." - NVIDIA PR

    Regardless what the reasons are behind this, running a two monitor setup will cause your system to literally bake.

    Yikes!

    I already wasn't impressed, but after reading this it looks more like a fiasco, than just a mild disappointment.

  • Without putting too fine a point on it, hardware like this used to be pretty cool. I have had several GTX 260 and a Asus 4870 for the past 1.5 years. I've even got two M1710 laptops with SLI. Truth is, I've yet to really flex the muscles on *any* of this hardware since I've owned it.

    There just aren't many Triple-A PC titles being made these days; let alone any that benefit much from hardware like this.

    It would be very cool if there *were* such titles. But there aren't. Worse, there are not many coming int

  • Folding@Home (Score:2, Interesting)

    by shino_crowell ( 1776802 )
    For most gaming applications ATI ran away with this round in the price/performance category. For F@H though, I think this is going to be a very interesting card, Nvidia just folds better than ATI. There are numerous reasons for this, and finger-pointing is futile, but thats the cold hard fact. The extended time that software-side engineers have had to play around with CUDA seems to have been beneficial. In time, and with work on their OpenCL implementation, I think the current generation Radeons will ca

  • Just bought a new gaming rig and went with ATI because nVidia didn't have a DX11 card. Probably would've gone with ATI anyways, but not supporting DX11 just put nVidia right out of the running.

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