Nvidia GTX 480 benchmarks
Posted by Kathleen Maher on April 16th 2010 | Discuss
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Hardware Review
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Benchmarking is very time consuming and we have great admiration for those websites that get so much of it done right after an AIB is released.
This is our second series of tests on the Nvidia GTX 480. Since it’s Nvidia’s flagship product, and has taken so long to get to market, we wanted to make sure we gave it the best tests we could do. As it was, due to monitor frustrations with DisplayPort, we were constrained to test at 1920 x 1080. However, as soon as we can get an active DP-to-DVI adaptor, or find a 30-inch 2560 x 1600 monitor or a DVI-to-DP adaptor, we’ll run more tests at higher resolutions such as those discussed in the “Seeing More Doing More,” article in this issue.
We ran five tests: Metro 2033, Stalker—Call of Pripyat, Unigine Heaven, Vantage, and Battlefield Bad Company 2. We ran frames-per-second (FPS) tests using FRAPS, and when the benchmark had its own score such as Unigine and Vantage do, we used that also, so we ended up with seven sets of scores.
We ran three ATI boards against the Nvidia GTX 280, the ATI Radeon HD 5870, 5870 Eyefinity6, and the 5970. Giving us four scores on seven benchmarks for a total of 28 values.
We also calculated the Pmark not just using Vantage but for Unigine, Vantage, and the average FPS of all five programs.
Pmark
Where:
- Performance is expressed in 3DMark Vantage score
- Price is expressed in US dollars
- Power is expressed in watts of the AIB
When Performance is expressed in FPS then the FPS score is multiplied by 1000 to put it in the same range as the 3D Vantage scores.
The test system: an Intel Core i7 x980 3.33GHz 6 cores (12 logical processors), DX58SO X58, 3GB DDR3 1.07 GHz system with two 160 GB SSDs, running Windows 7 (32-bit Ultimate, build 7600).
The tests were run at 1920x1080, with AA set to 8x when we could set it, and AF set to 16x, and extreme tessellation when we could set it.
Frames per second
Whenever a GPU supplier brings out a new chip, they always like to compare it across a lot of games using FPS and normalizing to either their own last GPU or the competition’s. So we did the same thing and normalized to the GTX 480.
In terms of raw power measured using FPS, the Nvidia GTX 480 is a clear winner. When power consumption and price are factored in, the GTX 480 only does well in one benchmark (Unigine). Nvidia will have to wait for more games to come out that will exploit its hardware; ATI had a similar problem with its last generation of parts. However, ATI won’t stand still and as new games are developed ATI will tune and tweak their GPUs to exploit the new games as well. That’s when we’ll see the real differences and values between the two GPUs.
