The GTX 480...

[Void(null)]

3 Billion Transistors, the equivalent of 4 quad-core I7 Processors. 1.5Gigs of DDR5 VRAM. 480 CUDA cores. 750MHz core clock speed, 3800MHz Memory clock Speed, 1500MHz Shader clock Speed.

All combine for a massive 182.4GB/sec bandwidth.

I want one... I really, really, really want one. My GTX 280 is dead to me now, but I know in 6-9 months the price for the GTX 480 will be something more sane and I will be able to see if nVidia will keep the 480 as its flagship or if they have a something a little saucier in the pipe.

But this GPU makes my penis hard... hard enough to punch through reinforced steel.

That is all.

[Llama8]

Sweet jesus! (http://www.scan.co.uk/Shop/Computer-Hardware/All/GPU-NVIDIA/NVIDIA-Geforce-GTX480-PCI-E-%28480-Cores%29) £400-£500!

[OneEyeRed]

Awesome sauce. I love my GTX 275 and this baby looks smoking hott!!!

[jiaco]

Check out the power consumption on this card before you order one without also ordering a new power supply...

[Renevent]

Awesome cards! But my 260GTX is still purring along for the time being...I'll wait for a price drop before grabbing a new one.

[Void(null)]

Yeah, the power consumption is through the roof, allegedly it also puts out a ton of heat aswell so while I wouldn't need a new PSU, I would perhaps need to spring for a cooling mount. Although I don't think I could draw power for 2 of them in SLI and thats really where this thing shines, with a previously unheard of 10% drop off for SLI. I can't even begin to imagine what could possibly require that much graphical power but if I had the spare cash I would so do it just to test it out.

Sadly I don't have a spare $500 kicking around, let alone $1000. What with us moving to Scotland, all of our savings are already spoken for, which is why I probably wont be seriously looking into picking one of these until closer to x-mas/new year.

But so very much do want.

I think this card represents to us PC gamers that leap that comes with the release of a brand new console. Its like if they had just released the Playstation 4 or something.

I really want to see some benchmark scores against the 5970.

[Void(null)]

Sweet jesus! (http://www.scan.co.uk/Shop/Computer-Hardware/All/GPU-NVIDIA/NVIDIA-Geforce-GTX480-PCI-E-%28480-Cores%29) £400-£500!

Oh man... they are "only" selling for $500 here in the US. Suddenly the move back to the UK looks a little less appealing. :p

Decent Healthcare and Education VS Cheap hardware prices... tough call.

[OneEyeRed]

Well you know how the market works Void. Give until the end of the year as you stated and this thing will be two hundred bucks on NewEgg. I bought my GTX 275 about five months ago. After supporting ATI for so many years I got sick of the mess that was with DAO and my HD3870. ATI endorsed the damn game and so many of us with this ATI card (as well as other models) were stuck in Ostragar with a blue and black screen of death. I fought with EA and ATI and after a month and a half with no patch and zero support, I had it.

I asked about and the GTX 275 was recommended. I researched and at the time it was on sale at NewEgg and for the price, it gave me the best bang for the buck. The funny thing is that I installed that card and DAO ran flawlessly. Furthermore, I don't think I have ever seen such a noticeable difference in graphical updates as with previous card swaps over the years.

I know the industry is raving about the new ATI cards and as far as I am concerned they can keep them. I will never buy another ATI card again. I love my GTX 275 and I still have two inches of room for a bigger card and my case has 8 fans. Even running AOC and LOTRO in DX 10, I never popped over 64 degrees.

[Void(null)]

I really like ATI, I think they have some amazing hardware but unfortunately, outside of benchmarks that hardware doesn't amount to much for my needs... because nVidia dominates the gaming market.

Sure nVidia uses a bunch of dirty tricks, essentially buying developers with truckloads of cheap or even free hardware so that the games will be developed and optimized on nVidia hardware.

I have seen ATI cards with superior benchmarks get crushed when it comes to converting that into FPS in the real world, and far too many games that had massive issues with ATI or downright not even run... such as the case with Saboteur.

Vantage scores say the 480 will be better than the 5870 but under the 5970, which makes sense what with the 5970 being an X2 card and $700+... I am sure the 480X2 or whatever that call it will jump leaps and bounds over the 5970 but that's besides the point right now. I am aching to see what this all translates into actual FPS in something like Crisis 2.

[eisprinzessin]

Sure nVidia uses a bunch of dirty tricks, essentially buying developers with truckloads of cheap or even free hardware so that the games will be developed and optimized on nVidia hardware.Shouldn't ATI support developers likewise?

[Void(null)]

They try, but honestly how many times do you see games with a big ATI logo on the front of them? I can think of only a handful, yet nVidia has become a regular part of the intro spam along with bink and speed tree.

While the whole "Way its meant to be played" crap started off as an advertising slogan, but nVidia have done everything in their power to make it an actuality where ATI takes second place for design and optimization, and I think PhysX was another nail that really hurt ATI, and CUDA didn't help matters either.

I don't even think its conscious on the part of developers, if you develop on nVidia it only goes to make sense that you are optimizing for that hardware. While you will toss that into a bunch of test machines many of which have ATI configs, if afterward you still go back and pick up work on your project on an nVidia based system there is going to be a bias.

If we take the Steam hardware survey as a rough yardstick.

nVidia owns 61% of the gaming market, ATI only 31.88%. Its the equivalent of AMD to Intel, AMD owning 30.51% and Intel a whopping 69.48%

Do you make your decisions for the 60% or the 30%? Sure developers will try to optimize for both but if you have to make a ATI/nVidia compatibility/performance call are you going to go for the 60% or the 30%?

[andreyy]

I make my decisions for what's cost effective.

I don't need the capabilities of this GPU and I won't need them, for a long time.

[Roros]

I'm interested in seeing how the whole DX11 situation will play out. Most (or practically all) games are made and scaled for consoles. Last I heard, PC game sales only make up 7%. That's a pretty narrow market for which to launch a $500 accessory which only a *very* few games take advantage of.

I'm pretty sure it's going to be a good while before we see DX11 exclusive games. At the very best, we will see console ports whose PC version will have some type of DX11 support for a couple novel effects just so they can advertise it on the box.

Some of the new DX11 features are a pretty big deal, and it's a shame that games can't take advantage of it due to consoles.

[eisprinzessin]

Do you make your decisions for the 60% or the 30%? Sure%2Well, if AMD/ATI had just 5% market share, then developers might neglect it. But if 1 of 3 machines uses ATI, then you need to develop for both ... or just use, what is supported by nvidia and ATI.

[Void(null)]

Aliens VS Predator and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 use the features of DX11 including tessellation and both were released on PC and console.

I really don't think consoles will be getting in the way of DX11.

[Void(null)]

Well, if AMD/ATI had just 5% market share, then developers might neglect it. But if 1 of 3 machines uses ATI, then you need to develop for both ... or just use, what is supported by nvidia and ATI.

It would be nice but it doesn't always work that way.

Take "The Saboteur" for example. On Release it did not work for ATI cards, at all... then the game was patched to provide half assed ATI support that still left the poor ATI users with a mess of problems.

The situation is unfortunately, not unique.

Now it doesn't happen with every game, but I would rather not take the chance and go for hardware I know is going to have the highest rate of compatibility.

[OneEyeRed]

CIV V is going to be DX 11 and I cannot wait!

[Llama8]

Yes, I'm sure civ will use a whole load of advanced effects... :rolleyes:

[Roros]

I believe Civ5 uses Tessellation for it's terrain which is pretty nifty.

The big deal is that the tessellated version comes at virtually no extra performance cost.

[Void(null)]

So 4 months have passed and I still want one of these puppies.

Me and the wife have $2000 to spare right now and while I could put down for a $300 GTX 470, still in my heart of hearts I know I want that 480... which is currently $500.

If they would just bring the 480 down to $400 I would snap one up in a heart beat. Perhaps in 2 months time they will come down to a sane price.

That being said, I will also be starting a 4 year degree pretty soon, so really just how much time I will have to play with a nice shiny 480 is anyone's guess. Its probably the sensible thing to just wait...

[Kardiophylax]

I've been happy with my 5850. Nvidia and ATI both have their share of issues with certain games and features, so I really don't think you can fairly say one is better than the other. In certain generations of cards, price/performance for one or the other tends to be better though. I saw mention of ATI cards not working with some games, but that's more an issue with the developer failing to QA properly than the card itself.

My Nvidia card, on my other system, requires a registry hack to be able to properly output DVI to HDMI without sending a non-existent sound signal (which tells my TV to ignore the audio plug coming from the PC). This required that I download a 3rd party application, gather data about my television, then edit my registry in multiple locations using a particular hex code. I don't think Nvidia is a bad company for this, even though they've not released a working patch/solution to resolve this issue for non-technical people. I simply make this statement to prove my point that ATI and Nvidia both have their issues from time to time. I shop based on my price range and which gaming benchmarks show the best value in that range.

[Void(null)]

In terms of price to performance, the GTX 470 is beautiful.

It beats out the 5850 in almost almost all the benchmarks while being equal in price.

Guru3D did an amazing comparison and review. (http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-470-480-review/1)

[Kardiophylax]

In terms of price to performance, the GTX 470 is beautiful.

It beats out the 5850 in almost almost all the benchmarks while being equal in price.

Guru3D did an amazing comparison and review. (http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-470-480-review/1)


I've had my 5850 for quite a few months now, so I of course expect to be able to buy more for the same money I spent on it then. Such is the nature of computer technology though, at some point you just have to dive in. I won't be shopping for a new video card for a few years now.

[Popeye]

How about that GTX 460?

[Void(null)]

GTX 460 is a bit on the nerfed side (http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-460-review/1) when compared to the 470 & 480, for all intents and purposes its a GTX 280 with DX11 support. So were talking 17fps in Metro at max settings.

If you can only afford $200 for a GPU I would wait 3-6 months for the 470 or the 5850 to go down to that price.

Its almost always better to buy the upper end of the last generation, than the bottom end of the new... although in this case DX11 is a major consideration so I really would suggest waiting until a decent GPU was within your price range.

[Coridan]

I have the GTX 480 and I love it. I was tired of messing around with my 285's so I got something that's reliable and a beast! This puppy runs circles around the 285's. Definitely right about the power consumption. I needed to upgrade to a 1000w power supply to get it to run.

[ZZSmufa]

Just chiming in about the power supplies. Unless you have a huge number of hard drives or a SLI/Crossfire setup, there's really no reason to get a 600+W power supply. The PSU manufacturers would of course want people to buy the kilowatt PSUs, but what you need is a quality power supply, not necessarily a bigger one.