NVIDIA We want to apologize for the confusion around our most recent GF100 update. To clarify, the launch date for GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 is March 26, 2010. This date also coincides with the GeForce LAN event NVIDIA is hosting at PAX 2010. Hope you can attend the show. For more info, please visit: www.nvidia.com/paxeast"
It looks like it might be a bit underwhelming, performance wise
Last week NVIDIA’s board partners finally got samples of Fermi based products. This means a finalized package - with perhaps some clock changes at best. Most of the partners received a GeForce GTX 470. Now here’s the difference with the aforementioned website, we know the majority specs and some performance results, however I’m not about to share them, I mean come on … give NVIDIA some credit here.
What I will tell you is that the clock frequencies on these boards surprised me, the GeForce 470 seems to be clocked at roughly 650 MHz, that’s lower than I expected. And that indeed will have an effect on performance. I think it’s safe to that the GeForce 470 and 480 will be worthy competitors towards the Radeon HD 5850 and 5870. Will it be a knock-out ? I doubt it very much. But is it important for NVIDIA to deliver a knockout to the competition ? Well they would hope so, but no … not really, as the current performance levels that ATI for example offers simply are superb already. Being six months late to the market does pose an issue, ATI will already be respinning and binning their upcoming products, clocked higher and they could match NVIDIA in either price or performance.
This retailer shows some absurd prices for the cards. If they are indeed true, then as badly as I want to go with NVidia since I hate ATI’s drivers, I will pick a 5870.
Drop that meme that ATI drivers are inferior to Nvidia drivers. I have had no trouble whatsoever with recent versions on Vista 64 with a 5850, and the update from 10.1 to 10.2 did not even require a reboot – unlike an Nvidia driver update. Moreover, ATI doesn’t install a ton of crapware for some useless 3D mode like Nvidia recently does. And curiously enough, Civ4 runs way faster with ATI than with Nvidia drivers – I think it’s not a hardware speedup but a driver issue because many odd pauses I used to see on Nvidia cards just aren’t there anymore.
Yeah, maybe it was bad luck but had nothing but headaches with blue screens with the 8800GTX and Nvidia drivers. After that, I switched to ATI and I haven’t looked back.
Their drivers are nice, and not only do they not require a reboot, but they’ll upgrade existing drivers seamlessly. Unlike Nvidia, which recommends you uninstall current drivers, reboot, install new drivers, reboot.
Anyway, I don’t know if those retailer prices are realistic but I do suspect that GF100 cards will be overpriced for whatever performance they deliver. The 5850 is currently going for $30-$50 over ATI’s originally intended price, and even at that price it’s a better deal than any Nvidia card. And it’s already a DX11 card with better performance than most gamers need. Oh, and ATI also provides a range of cheaper DX11 cards that are still fast enough for most people.
Nvidia has clearly lost its ability to make consumer-grade hardware. Prediction: GF100 is another ultra-high-end product that’s far too expensive for most consumers, and Nvidia once again will be unable to scale it down to a reasonable price range. I’m just waiting for an announcement that they are leaving the market altogether in favor of high-end graphical workstations and high-performance computing.
My 4870 stopped working though the DVI port with my BenQ monitor and I’ve never been able to make it work again no matter how many Catalyst revisions I try. Plus there’s the fact that they’ve basically disabled the maintain aspect ratio and GPU scaling options in Catalyst Control Center, and it looks like it’s never coming back. Someone stated on their forums that supposedly it’s Windows 7 that must take care of the scaling instead of the GPU, but that looks like a bunch of BS to me.
In comparison I have much better memories of my time spent with GeForce cards and with ForceWare. Hence why I hope to switch sides.
The way the rumors are going about Fermi yields, hopefully anyone who really wants a GTX 480 is already an editor for one of the top tier hardware websites, otherwise they’re going to be basically impossible to come by.
Yeah, this article was a hilarious read into the level of fail involved in Fermi.
If it’s true, of course. We’ll find out in a few months, but I’m convinced.
Both ATI and Nvidia drivers are extremely poor. Every new “stable” version seems to break existing functionality and there’s nary a mention of this in the release notes.
If it’s true, of course. We’ll find out in a few months, but I’m convinced.
Ugh, that doesn’t sound good. While Charlie is often, well, semi-accurate, that article seems to be well sourced enough to sound credible. When parts do arrive on reviewer’s doorsteps, we’ll need to do due diligence to make sure it’s not some kind of paper launch.
Speaking of ATI drivers I also had issues with them when I first installed this 5770 in my new pc. The first problem I had was after installing the drivers the computer would boot into windows and all I could see what a corrupt screen. No biggie just had to safeboot and then fix the resolution. Second problem was that when I tried to select the correct which was 1920 x 1080 there was overscan so it didn’t fit correctly. I did some google work and I discovered that I had to install the ATI CC and select the resolution that I wanted from the ATI control panel and not from windows.
Not a huge deal but it was odd that I can’t just use the windows tool to change my resolution.
Don’t really see why, unless you want to run mulitple monitors like ATI’s eyefinity or are moving up to a 30" screen, the “sweet” spot of 2 generations ago, the geforce 260, is still perfectly viable across the board. Most games are console ports anyway, and the 260 is much faster than the 360 or PS3. Even the 5850 from the current generation is probably overkill for most people.
I’ve owned a Dell 3007 30" since around Nov 2006, and currently run a GTX 285. Which, honestly, is powerful enough for any game I own, and I’m sure plenty fast enough for most of what I expect to buy this year (Alpha Protocol, DA: Awakening, StarCraft 2, Fallout: Vegas, etc.). But I’ve owned this 285 for a little over a year now and that upgrade itch is becoming more and more insistent.
