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Nvidia has been pretty tight lipped when it comes to Fermi's performance numbers, but as the March 26th launch date approaches, a few additional details are starting to leak out. This time it's a video documenting some early benchmarks, giving us our first real peak at Fermi's performance. Of course we would be remiss if we didn't mention that the Heaven benchmark utility demonstrated in the video was administered solely by Nvidia themselves, and as such, the results should be taken with a grain of salt until we've had our own opportunity to put it through its paces.
The demo shows the GTX 480 pushing out some pretty impressive frame rates, even besting the ATI 5870 results they claim to have run earlier, but it certainly doesn't look like as big a margin as we were hoping for. The GTX 480 as you might recall is going to be the companies new high end offering, and although no pricing has yet been announced, rumors have put it somewhere in the $700 USD range. The Radeon 5870's by comparison can be found starting at around $380. If the rumored pricing ends up being true the more realistic comparison would be the Radeon 5970 vs. the GTX 480.
Only time will tell if the GTX 480 & 470 cards are as hot or as expensive as we fear, but one thing is for certain, the silence and vague details isn't helping their cause. Scroll down to check out the video for yourself. Did the demonstration win you over?
Let us know what you think.
Comments are closed on this article
johnny3144
March 07, 2010 at 11:15am
first, based on the benchmarks, fermi is not only 15% faster, it's GTX480 is atleast 20% faster. second, this card is not target to mainstream buyers, it's intended for people who must have the fastest/newest thing on the market where money is no object. they don't release anything under GTX 470, to force these people buy the $500+ stuff. kinda like how intel release the $1000 extreme line first, while the $600 CPU may overclock and perform almost the same released later on. just because the card isn't meant for you, doesn't mean it fail. this card not only took the performance crown for nvidia once again(by no small margin), this price will prob generate the maximum profit for nvidia anyways. a huge success for nvidia
as for power hungry, if you are running a $700 card, should you really be running off cheap 30buck PSU? i run a 8800GTS G92 and i have 750W from corsair which i bought for only 70 dollars.
as successful as it may be, the card is too expensive for me, so i will wait for the price war to start and grab which one give me the most bang for the buck.
on a side note, i think fermi refer to fermi energy in semi-conductors
TechJunkie
March 07, 2010 at 2:30pm
This card is only 20% faster than the 5870 in the tesselation benchmark provided by nVidia, not by outside sources. It is though roughly 5% faster in normal games provided today. Most developers haven't even implemented tesselation in thier games yet so it is actualy a mute point. I have an Ultra X3 850w, single rail unit @ 52amps, but I'm talking the mainstream using only a 500 and 600w units. Why should they have to upgrade? But look at nVidia's OWN benchmarks.....it's only faster in tesselation....price to performance as of right now? Fail.
mitcoes
March 07, 2010 at 6:18am
Anyone knows where can I find that case.
It seems very easy to operate, with no metal that can make contacts.
JMember
March 07, 2010 at 5:53am
Maybe it's to lead the market in making fast chips, this will make "ignorant" people think that nVidia is the best chips out there, and it isn't.... Either ATI/nVidia are good, just depends on the series and the money you are paying :D
Keith E. Whisman
March 06, 2010 at 11:56pm
Sorry Nvidia it's only business it's not personal at all. I have to say that the Radeon 5870 is by far a much better buy when it comes to price and performance. I am admittedly an Nvidia fanboy but I don't buy blindly. I go for the highest performance possible but when the Radeon card is only slightly slower and costs considerably less then I have to award ATI/AMD.
Nvidia you need to get back into the business of blowing your competition out of the water and this just isn't it. A New Nvidia card needs to be ridiculously faster than it's competition.
Neufeldt2002
March 06, 2010 at 11:01pm
I'll wait for the independent reviews and benchmarks. But if I had to choose right now, ATI is the better bang for the buck according to what I saw.
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KyleG
March 06, 2010 at 10:58pm
Why aren't they testing this against ATI's latest card, the 5970????
That's ATI's latest, fastest card and is this cards real competition.
Looks like ATI is still winning this war and has better bang for their buck.
700$! woah. the 5970 is only 600$. And this card will perform less than the 5970.
Come on Nvidia...dissapointed.
dc10ten
March 06, 2010 at 11:36pm
remember it is too early to tell which way this will lean. we are pretty much at a point similar to when the 8000 series cards came out and people were waiting on ati's 2000 series.
Even if they don't necessarily win the top crown, nvidia should be fine. They have R&D in more than just this (otherwise this might have been out sooner). Drivers tend to be better using nvidia cards, minus a couple of spots (early vista drivers).
I'm more curious on how this stacks to their current cards, how they do with parallel computing, and price.
jihnn
March 07, 2010 at 11:11am
the other day i did a simple google search for problems with nvidia drivers and in less than a second it came back with
10,800,000
threads on past and present problems..
i'm sure ati has about the same give or take, so i say buy the card that works best for your needs and budget
Biceps
March 06, 2010 at 11:35pm
The 5970 is a dual GPU card, and the the 480 is a single GPU card. Throw a couple 480s in SLI and then it might be fair to compare, GPU to GPU. That said, it looks like the one processor on the 480 is going to be as power hungry and hot as the two processors on the 5970. I am sure we'll get to see the comparison you are talking about when our friends at Maximum PC get their hands on one :)
Stry8993
March 07, 2010 at 12:05am
And here in Canada, two 5970's is $1000 to $1200.
Its price vs performance. Would I pay $850 (CAD) for a single GTX 480, or $500 to $600 for a Dual GPU Graphics card?
Thats a null arguement man, because fanboyism aside, 60 FPS solid, is fine for me, whomever its coming from, and if I can save myself $200 bucks, then your darn tootin' I'm gonna be doing that.
nVidia has a lot of interesting stuff, PhysX, 3D, jazz like that. But, I've seen a 9800GTX running alongside a 5870, and playing Mirror's Edge, so, its possible to have the PhysX and use it too.
NOOBZ1LLA
March 16, 2010 at 1:31pm
The only reason you might even think about buying an Nvidia card is if games you wanna play are gonna utilize Physx. In those games Nvidia basically crippples all ATI cards for some reason. I really kind of hate NVidia for that. Why not allow ATI cards to render Physx? You scared?
Justin.Kerr
March 16, 2010 at 4:49pm
I'm still waiting to see it take off in a meaningful way. I'm not convinced it will help them win the war in the long run.
kevaskous
March 07, 2010 at 12:02am
This argument gets really tiring. Who cares, honestly, 5970 is 100$ cheaper and will be faster, that's all anyone is really gonna care about outside of a VERY VERY small niche market who has 4 grand to blow on GPU's. Even most avid gamers and enthusiast arn't gonna give a rats ass whether it's a 40 GPU system beating a single GPU, as long as it is consistent and cheaper, what difference does that make.
