Windows 7 DX11 Cards

Was the wait worth it? Will you be buying one?

  • Price is too high so no to Fermi..

    Votes: 2 16.7%
  • I bought a 5000 series and am happy..

    Votes: 5 41.7%
  • Both Fermi and 5000 series way too expensive

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • At last! Can't wait to get my Fermi.

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • I'm waiting until the price drops.

    Votes: 4 33.3%
  • I'm going to wait for the refresh and 512 cores

    Votes: 1 8.3%

  • Total voters
    12
The whole FERMI affair is like using a condom after the finding ya woman is 6 month pregnant as birth control... even if its the best card they have ever made, the cheapest top end card they have released etc.... It too late to claw back the win in overtime. Maybe next revision at the end of the year fix things, but now? I'd be to worried about reliability after all the spec changes and last minute power changes etc to spend that sorta cash.
 
Another Fermi slide leaks Link Removed due to 404 Error Link Removed due to 404 Error Written by Link Removed due to 404 Error Thursday, 18 March 2010 13:52
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Is this the final design?


Guys from Donanimhaber.com managed to get their hands on a slide which shows crude specs of the GF100 based GTX 480 card in what appears to be the final design. We can confirm that this is the same slide that we had a chance to see during CeBIT but that was when photographing was strictly forbidden and fingers were held on shutdown buttons.

The slide does show some specs that were quite well known even before CeBIT, but the interesting part is the picture next to the specification list which shows four heatpipes sticking out from the top of the card. Bear in mind that this slide was shown at CeBIT and that Nvidia might have changed some things as partners still didn't get a full batch of cards.

The card on the slide should have 1536MB of memory paired up with a 384-bit memory interface, 6 and 8-pin PCI-Express connectors, two dual-DVI and mini HDMI outputs.

In any case, more leaks should happen pretty soon as March 26th launch is drawing closer.

You can find out more Link Removed - Invalid URL.

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Around €479 in Continental Europe

Geforce GTX 480 and 470 got their prices, but again, these prices will vary from country to country. While in most of countries the pricing guideline is to sell GTX 480 for €450 in some countries it might sell for less than that, but in some it might go as high as €479.

The UK price is £429 at this also depends of the greed of retailers that will sell them, and Nvidia´s (read Fionas) power to sanction the ones who cross this price guide set by Nvidia.

The Geforce GTX 470 will sell for €349 in most of Euroland, but the same rules apply. Some “cheaper” countries will get it below this price and some more expensive countries e.g. Scandinavia will have to pay a bit more than this. The UK chaps can count with £299 suggested etail price. We are very sure that Danish at Greenland will have to pay much more than the suggested etail price but won't worry about the cooling and the high TDP.

The launch is still early morning, midnightish on the night between 26th and 27th of March, but mass availability is expected April 6th.

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Clocks, pricing and pictures

Nvidia
Geforce GTX 480 and GTX 470 rumours have started to show up all around the Internet and we are quite sure that more info will be confirmed as we draw closer to the March 26th/27th launch date.

VR-Zone has posted full specification list including the clocks, shader numbers, memory interface as well as the rumoured price for both cards while Expreview managed to get detailed pictures of the XFX GTX 480 and 470 cards.

According to VR-Zone, Geforce GTX 480 has 480 stream processors and works at 700MHz for the core, 1401MHz for shaders and features 1536MB of memory that works at 1848MHz and paired up with a 384-bit memory interface. The Geforce GTX 470 has 448 stream processors and works at 607MHz for the core, 1215MHz for shaders and 1674MHz for 1280MB of memory paired up with a 320-bit memory interface.

VR-Zone has also posted some price details and according to their info, the GTX 480 should be priced at US $499 while the GTX 470 should have a suggested price tag set at US $349.

Expreview managed to score pictures of XFX's GTX 470 as well as the GTX 480 and these look like a final design, at least when compared to the picture from Nvidia's latest slides.
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Blame TSMC, again
By Link Removed - Invalid URL
Mon Mar 22 2010, 06:22

THE UNFASHIONABLY LATE next-gen graphics core from Nvidia, Fermi, also known as the GF100, also known as GTX480 and GTX470, will pack a smaller punch than initially expected.
According to Digitimes, Nvidia's own board partners have put forward a theory that TSMC’s 40nm isn’t good enough to produce cores containing the full 512 CUDA cores that should shock and awe consumers.
The Green Goblin now seems poised to release cut-down versions of both the GTX480 and GTX470 that should have 480 and 448cores, respectively.
Anyone in the Link Removed - Invalid URL will tell you this makes little sense.
Nvidia has to have made a choice - either it can have a full 512 cores with a lower yield and output a smaller number of GPUs, or it can in fact produce to meet volume demands (and campaign promises), only at less than optimum quality and power, as part of a more dastardly plan.
So, the fact of the matter is, there is a good chance that the GTX480 that Nvidia will release on March 26th through April 6th will not perform on the same levels as those about which certain benchmarks have leaked throughout this last month.
What it does feel like is that Nvidia is actually redoing its marketing plan and going ahead with a slightly less Link Removed - Invalid URL first attempt at Fermi, just so it can later launch cards with the promised 512 cores and sell a few more chips on the upper-extreme high end after that, eventually. GTX490, anyone?
After all, what die hard Nvidia enthusiast worthy of the name won't pay twice, if not both twice and twice as much, for the same Link Removed - Invalid URL? µ

Fermi gpus to pack less of a punch - The Inquirer
 
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607MHz clock

Since the official launch of Fermi is on Friday US / late Friday night / Saturday morning in Europe, we are getting the last hidden details on the of slower of two Fermi cards.

Geforce GTX 470 has 448 cores, packs 1280MHz GDDR5 memory with a 320-bit memory interface clocked at 1674MHz has a TDP of 215W.

This is still much higher than Radeon HD 5870 TDP of 188W, or 170W TDP of Radeon HD 5850, but as long as it's faster, end users won't mind the TDP value. However, 215W is not a small value for slower of two cards and it will generate quite some heat, but with the help of Nvidia's new fan, temperature should be within the normal range.

Geforce GTX 470 shaders work at 1215MHz or twice as fast as 607MHz core clock and the performance of this card should be close to Radeon HD 5870 and definitely faster than HD 5850.

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5-10 percent benchmarking advantage for the GTX 480 over ATI's HD 5870

Mar 19th 2010

5-10 percent benchmarking advantage for the GTX 480 over ATI's HD 5870

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 and 470 specs and pricing emerge -- Engadget

We're only a week away from their grand unveiling, but already we've got word of the specs for NVIDIA's high end GTX 480 and GTX 470 cards. Priced at $499, the 480 will offer 480 shader processors, a 384-bit interface to 1.5GB of onboard GDDR5 RAM, and clock speeds of 700MHz, 1,401MHz, and 1,848MHz for the core, shaders and memory, respectively. The 470 makes do with 446 SPs, slower clocks, and a 320-bit memory interface, but it's also priced at a more sensible $349. The TDPs of these cards are pretty spectacular too, with 225W for the junior model and 295W for the full-fat card. Sourced by VR Zone, these numbers are still unofficial, but they do look to mesh well with what we already know of the hardware, including a purported 5-10 percent benchmarking advantage for the GTX 480 over ATI's HD 5870. Whether the price and power premium is worth it will be up to you and the inevitable slew of reviews to decide.

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Mass availability

It looks
like Nvidia has pulled off yet another delay out of its sleeve, and this time we are talking about the availability date that has been pushed back from the original 6th of April to the week of April 12th.

We aren't sure if this delay is limited to certain markets, like Europe, or it will be a worldwide delay but we do know that it has nothing to do with the launch date of Fermi as this is the only Nvidia's estimate on when will partners be able to get the product on e-tail/retail shelves.

Nvidia recently changed the bios and the cooler and this might be some of the reasons behind the additional delay.

The date is week of April 12th as it also depends on how fast will partners be to ship the actual product to retail/e-tail as well, and some cards might show sooner. Of course, Nvidia's estimate is based on when it will ship a full batch to its Fermi cards to partners.

The launch date is pretty close and we'll have to wait and see if Nvidia will talk about mass availability schedule once it launches the card.

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Wonder if these features will indeed be present in GTX 380/480:

- MIMD cores that function asynchronously and independently. At any time, different processors may be executing different instructions on different pieces of data. MIMD architectures may be used in a number of application areas such as computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing, simulation, modeling, and as communication switches.

MIMD - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

- 1,5 Gb Memory
- 256/512 Fused Multiply-Add [FMA] operations per clock
- Ferni architecture natively supports C [CUDA], C++, DirectCompute, DirectX 11, Fortran, OpenCL, OpenGL 3.1 and OpenGL 3.2, PhysX and OptiX Ray Tracing. Now, you've read that correctly - Ferni comes with a support for native execution of C++. For the first time in history, a GPU can run C++ code with no major issues or performance penalties and when you add Fortran or C to that, it is easy to see that GPGPU-wise

nVidia GT300's Fermi architecture unveiled: 512 cores, up to 6GB GDDR5 - Bright Side Of News*

- Fermi will not only be faster than the single GPU model Cypress (Radeon HD 5870) but might even compete with the Hemlock models (Radeon HD 5870 X2)

GT300: New rumors about Nvidia's DirectX 11 chip with codename Fermi - Nvidia, GT300, DirectX 11, Graphics card, Fermi - PC Games Hardware

Sounds too good to be true ?
 
March 27th 00:01 CET, 23.01 BST March 26th

The world is full of time zones and the simultaneous launch of Fermi, Geforce GTX 480 and 470 will happen on March 26th, at 15.00 Pacific Standard Time (Pacific coast), 18.01 East Coast time, 23.01 British standard times and Central Europeans will see the first reviews on the March 27th at 00:01, or what we call midnight.


We can only speculate that Nvidia waited for the New York stock exchange to close before it launches the card, to let the stocks possibly rise or fall over the weekend.

The opinions will definitely be divided as tonight, it’s highly unlikely that you will be able to buy a card. There might be some cards here and there, but real availability can be expected on April 12th, only in case if Nvidia doesn’t shift this date again.

Performance wise, in some test and heavy AA and Anisotropic settings powered with super high resolutions, you will see somewhere between 20 to even 50 percent performance increase over Radeon 5870, but do have in mind that at this settings Fermi, Geforce GTX 480 loses to the dual-GPU Radeon 5970, which will remain the fastest card on market.

In most games Fermi should end up slightly faster than Radeon HD 5870. Be sure to return at midnight as we might have much more scores for you as we are testing the card as we speak. Stay tuned for more.
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This is the first review I've found and so have posted the conclusion to save you guys the time.. Admittedly Guru3D is a Nvidia site so bias will be a little towards Nvidia but to be fair to the site they are as impartial as they can be..

The Verdict
Ouch! My fingers hurt from typing. Hey, you know what, I definitely like both the GeForce GTX 470 and 480. Performance wise things are looking very solid, even with early Beta drivers. Would this series have been released six months ago, everybody would have been hysterical with raving reviews. But yeah... there of course was this company called ATI who definitely got their stuff right at first try and ran away like a dog with a nice fresh meaty bone to chew on. The bar was set pretty high by ATI alright.
Admittedly while very strong, both the GeForce GTX 470 and 480 are not a slam dunk homerun compared to the fastest ATI 5800 series single GPU solutions. The reference Radeon HD 5870 keeps up with the GTX 480 pretty well on many occasions and a stinging fact is that its price is gradually dropping towards 429 USD, coming down from 469 USD (which is an interesting fact all by itself as it was launched at 399 USD). ATI reaps mucho benefits from the release of their Catalyst 10.3 driver (used in this review). The new driver brings significant performance boosts throughout the Radeon HD 5800 and 5900 series. Performance was enhanced in a lot of game titles. Would ATI not have released Catalyst 10.3 on time, then this review would have looked different. You'll probably notice a review or two out on the web using older drivers.
The fun thing is, in a couple of months the same thing will happen for NVIDIA with new drivers, 10% here, 7% there .. hey, that's how it works.
Even so, when we tally up the results out of all titles tested, the GeForce GTX 480 wins nearly everywhere except in Anno 1404 and ironically 3DMark Vantage. There are scenarios where the GTX 480 is very close to the 5870, but there are also scenarios where the GTX 480 completely and utterly kicks the Radeon HD 5870 in the proverbial nuts. What surprised me was the fact that say from 1280x1024 up-to 1920x1200 NVIDIA seems stronger than the competition. And at 2560x1600 things tend to equalize a much more.
When we focus solely on the GTX 480 now for a minute, substandard and topic of discussion obviously has to be the TDP -- the card when stressed will utilize nearly 250 Watts and that certainly is pretty steep power consumption, especially compared to ATI's Radeon 5870 with a TDP of only 188W. You are going to need a decently ventilated PC as the heat the GeForce GTX 480 produces is plentiful. Make no mistake, the card will get hot, very hot. So that's definitely something you need to keep in the back of your head.
In the end though, the GeForce GTX 480 is a graphics card that kicks ***, it is without doubt the fastest single GPU based graphics card on the block. The performance is grand and impressive and well, it's just a sick card to play all modern games with at any resolution or image quality preference.
The GeForce GTX 470 then -- obviously this card is lined up against ATI's Radeon HD 5850. It can compete with it quite well. Price wise it's definitely the more interesting of the two cards tested today. We expect that, once volume availability kicks in, this card will drop to roughly 300 USD. Performance wise we are looking at a product that positions itself smack down in the middle ATI's Radeon HD 5850 performance level and as such it's a really nice card to own. TDP wise at 215W we feel that power consumption is reasonable, and much like the GTX 480, we do also need to state that the heat output of the card currently is high but though not as high as the GTX 480. In fact we have a gut feeling that NVIDIA we reprogram the FAN RPM delta real soon, forcing the fan speed RPM at 70% which was not even every noisy, pushed the temperatures back to 80 Degrees C real quickly. Gaming wise the performance is obviously grand and the image quality it outputs is really high ranking as well. Money versus performance wise I'd say the GTX 470 is the winner of the two really.
As this article has shown, the newer software titles will benefit greatly from the new NVIDIA GeForce series 400 graphics cards. Metro 2033 is just stunning to play and when you look at the Just Cause 2 benchmarks all you can do is sit there, watch, with your mouth open. Stunning to look at and the performance is just brilliant combined with massive image quality settings. Consoles .. eat your heart out !
So there you have it you guys, temperatures at and TDP definitely can be considered trivial, but for most of you guys that is a non-issue, you are certainly looking at the fastest GPUs on the block in their respective category. Additional benefits for NVIDIA cards are of course PhysX which definitely is gaining more ground since the last year. It's a nice feature to have, sure... CUDA, we haven't talked about it much just yet. But obviously the GF100 GPUs are fully CUDA ready, in fact the architecture was designed with CUDA in mind. On the compute side of things we know one thing for sure, the GF100 should be impressive.
DX11 performance -- what we noticed in our test sessions is that the GeForce GTX 470 and 480 hold their ground really well in DX11 applications. Tessellation performance is downright terrific, the choice of putting a HW tesselator in each SM (shader cluster) definitely seems to be the right call to make architecture wise.
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Alright, let me wrap up this conclusion. When we look purely at the image quality and brute game performance, that's where the GTX 470 ($349) and 480 ($499) shine, they are imposing, impressive and most definitely cards that will deliver a massive amount of performance. Brute force is what you'll receive with these products. We had a blast for sure testing them and drivers wise just did not run into any issues. Price vs performance wise we feel the GTX 480 is priced a notch too high though. And with a 150 USD difference that makes the winner of them both the GTX 470. The generic consensus has to be that the GeForce GTX 480 is definitely faster than the currently leading single GPU flagship from team red, the Radeon HD 5870. As such the GeForce GTX is more than convincing enough and makes a very strong impression. NVIDIA regains the performance crown and is back in the saddle like a cowboy after a harsh shootout, riding its horse into the sunset. Never ever has the graphics card arena been this close when it comes to sheer competition, and you know what ... we just love it.

Read the whole review here: GeForce GTX 470 & 480 review

So the 480 is the new king but at what price? £150 for 10-20% is a tad expensive for me. The 470 might be more attractive price wise but this will be priced similar to the 5870 which is a faster card....
 
Here's another review from Fudzilla a site more impartial than Guru3d and so with a different conclusion:

Review: Fast, pricey and hot

The most anticipated graphics card is rather interesting, and no one can argue the fact that it is the fastest single-GPU card on the market. On the other hand, it is also the most complex piece of graphics silicon that was ever created, and at 3.2 billion transistors it is certainly the most impressive one.

The GF100 is designed for future games based on DirectX 11 specs, and it bets on the importance of DirectX 11 tessellation coupled with a significant geometric performance increase but today it cannot shine. It is faster than any single-GPU card graphics card and performs quite well in new DirectX 11 tests. Compared to the GT200 generation, the new GPU offers several major improvements. Physics processing is now more efficient, as well as ray tracing. Let's not forget tessellation, either.

However, while the state of the art architecture is something to drool over, real life tests and economics work against the GTX 480. In most scenarios it is 15 to 20 percent faster than the HD 5870. On the other hand, AMD's HD 5870 is available for about €330, while the GTX 480 will set you back €450. So, the architecture gets our thumbs up, but the actual card leaves much to be desired. While it is somewhat faster than the HD 5870, it's pricey, hot and it needs quite a bit more power than the HD 5870. The fact that an HD 5970 costs €515 also works against it.

It is possible the GTX 480 will manage to outpace AMD's 5000 series cards by a wider margin in new games, and a 512-shader version could help turn the tables. Although Nvidia is back in the game, it still has a long way to go.

Read the full review here: Link Removed due to 404 Error
 
after looking at the new benchmarks from guru 3d etc, i'm quietly laughing that the 480GTX costs £448 (overclockers pre-order prices) which is almost TWICE what I paid for a 5870 that isn't hugley different in scores. It's wprth mentioning had I waited for Nvidia just 3 weeks I would have got the 470GTX and been a bit pissed that a £338 card is matched against a humble £230 5850
 
Yup, the full review is posted above and as I said Guru3d is an Nvidia site so expect a little flag waving..

Hey, Kem, I DID read that note - and I sure saw your point and kept that in mind. :)

Of course there are and will be other benchmarks as well. e.g.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480: GF100 Has Landed - HotHardware - p1
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480: GF100 Has Landed - HotHardware - p11 Crysis

Some report GTX 480 is faster than ATI 5970, others - vice versa. It depends on what's tested.

FPS wise 5870 ~ gtx 480. :) I think.
 
No worries Greg.. I thought you'd missed that I'd already posted the review but now realise you were just pointing out that particular section so apologies if I came across a little strong.. :)
 
According to Donanimhaber.com, AMD is working on 2nd generation DX11 line-up and it will be based on completly new GPU Link Removed - Invalid URL. Donanim Haber also underlines that, next-gen cards will be launched in 2nd half of this year as Dirk Meyer (AMD' CEO) said before. Still there is no official infos about the technical details of new architecture but some people speculates that new design supports MIMD desing approach.

Sources; Donanimhaber.com

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