14 DAY TRIAL // After months and months of delays and secrecy, NVIDIA's highly anticipated GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480 graphics adapters have finally seen the light of day, with the Santa Clara-based GPU maker having made the formal announcement at PAX 2010. They are made on the 40nm GF100 graphics processing unit, designed on the Fermi architecture, and, according to NVIDIA, are the most powerful single-GPU cards in existence.
With the launch of these two specimens, NVIDIA will finally start to fight AMD's Cypress-based products over control of the high-end DirectX 11 graphics market. In fact, the Santa Clara-based GPU maker put special emphasis on optimizing and accelerating tessellation, to the point where the actual 3DMark scores were lower than those of the Radeon HD 5870 and 5850. On the other hand, their refresh rates were higher. The company built its cards in such a way because it expects tessellation to become the next method of game rendering.
The GTX 470 measures 9.5 inches, has 448 CUDA cores, 56 texture units, 1280MB GDDR5 with an interface of 320 bits and GPU/shader/memory clocks of 607/1215/3348MHz. This performance is enabled by a TDP of 215W. The second model, the 10.5-inch GTX 480, is more powerful, with 60 texture units, 480 cores, 1536MB GDDR5 with an interface of 384 bits and GPU/shader/memory clocks of 700/1401/3696 MHz. The TDP is of 250W.
The focus on tessellation is, in truth, the reason why some reviewers did not consider the cards to be very convenient purchases, at least not for now. Today's games, with a few exceptions, don't use tessellation, which means that a significantly cheaper and lower-power Radeon HD 5000 adapter can bring the same experience. Still, NVIDIA did manage to reclaim its crown as owner of the world's fastest adapter, with reviews finding that the total speed increase of the GTX 480 over the HD 5870 is of 10 to 15%. Nevertheless, combined with the high power consumption and the equally high temperature of the GPU (barely handled by the elaborate cooling module), this performance is not enough to offset the high price.
The GTX 470 and GTX 480 are priced at $349 and $499, respectively, and will become widely available on April 12.
