14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA has kept praising its GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480 graphics cards ever since it first mentioned them but, so far, hasn't given out any information to support that claim, hoping to surprise people at PAX 2010. This, of course, did not stop various leaks and reports from emerging on their own and, as such, whether NVIDIA liked it or not, the specs of the two graphics adapters made themselves known some time ago. The only thing left was for an actual benchmark to be performed, which seems to have finally been done.
The benchmark results, whose validity remains unconfirmed, surfaced on arabhardware and seem to confirm NVIDIA's claim that the GTX 480 is superior to the Radeon HD 5870. The test had the two cards pitted against each other while running DiRT 2 in DirectX 11 and Far Cry 2 in three resolutions.
In all cases, NVIDIA's card came out superior by an amount that may seem a lot to some and not enough to those that expected NVIDIA's delay to yield an even greater performance. Still, what the benchmarks suggest is that, indeed, the GTX 480 will become the fastest existing card with a single GPU.
Regardless of its validity, this set of benchmarking results is the first of its kind to deal with this comparison since NVIDIA's released its video of the 480 running the Unigine benchmark. Of course, skeptics will not immediately trust those in-house tests, which makes these new benchmarks all the more interesting. Nevertheless, end-users will have to wait for the formal announcement and, of course, for reviewers to say just how well the cards perform.
The launch of the GF100-enabled graphics adapters will take place on March 26, although stores and retailers might not start shipping the products before April 6.
