Like I expected, Nvidia is gonna do something within Q1 of 2010 else they're loosing a big piece of action in the current graphic card profit cake, AMD is gonna make big bucks out of their absent in this competition.
Ever since AMD launched their HD5850 and HD5870, the gaming scene went mad with DX11 support which adds numerous new capabilities compare to previous generation graphics card, especially tessellation, DirectX 11 and anti-aliasing by maintaining performance
Nvidia GTX 4xx series, a direct competition to the AMD HD 5xxx series, especially the HD5850 and the HD5870. The Nvidia GTX480 will be competing against the AMD HD5870 and the Nvidia GTX470 is a head on to the AMD HD5850.
Based on a few review sites, there's a mix reaction on the new Nvidia Fermi architecture based cards. The performance of the new GTX4xx cards score around 10% faster than the AMD HD5850 and HD5870 on most tests, especially performing faster on high resolution with high anti-alias on, however the cards is pretty warm (or Hot !) around 95 Degree Celsius on full load. (quite normal for high-end card to reach 90c on full load, but not good enough comparing to some equally performing cards)
The new Nvidia cards doesn't fully feature the full 512 Stream Processors as promised before, somehow only 480 are activated on the GTX480 due to some yield problem with the current Fermi chip. Nonetheless, it performed well on most tests....excluding its initial pricing and temperature performance(not impressive).
Now, we can see the specs below :
| Graphics cards | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 1,536MB | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 1,280MB | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 1,024MB | ATI Radeon HD 5970 2,048MB | ATI Radeon HD 5870 1,048MB | ATI Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| General clock | 700MHz | 607MHz | 576MHz | 648MHz | 725MHz | 850MHz | 725MHz |
| Shader clock | 1,401MHz | 1,215MHz | 1,242MHz | 1,476MHz | 725MHz | 850MHz | 725MHz |
| Memory clock (effective) | 3,696MHz | 3,348MHz | 1,998MHz | 2,484MHz | 4,000MHz | 4,800MHz | 4,000MHz |
| Memory interface and size | 384-bit, 1,536MB GDDR5 | 320-bit, 1,280MB GDDR5 | 896-bit (2 x 448-bit), 1,792MB, GDDR3 | 512-bit, 1,024MB, GDDR3 | 512-bit (2 x 256-bit), 2,048MB | 256-bit, 1,024MB, GDDR5 | 256-bit, 1,024MB, GDDR5 |
| Memory bandwidth | 177.4GB/s | 133.9GB/s | 2 x 111.9GB/s | 159GB/s | 2 x 128GB/s | 153.6GB/s | 128GB/s |
| Manufacturing process | TSMC, 40nm | TSMC, 40nm | TSMC, 55nm | TSMC, 55nm | TSMC, 40nm | TSMC, 40nm | TSMC, 40nm |
| DirectX/ Shader Model | DX11, 5.0 | DX11, 5.0 | DX10, 4.0 | DX10, 4.0 | DX11, 5.0 | DX11, 5.0 | DX11, 5.0 |
| Vertex, fragment, geometry shading (shared) | 480 FP32 scalar ALUs, MADD + MUL | 448 FP32 scalar ALUs, MADD + MUL | 480 FP32 scalar ALUs, MADD + MUL | 240 FP32 scalar ALUs, MADD + MUL | 3,200 FP32 scalar ALUs, MADD + MUL | 1,600 FP32 scalar ALUs, MADD + MUL | 1,440 FP32 scalar ALUs, MADD + MUL |
| Single-precision GFLOPS (single-issue) | 1,345 | 1,088 | 1,192 | 708 | 4,176 | 2,720 | 2,088 |
| Texturing | 60ppc bilinear 30ppc FP16 15ppc FP32 | 56ppc bilinear 28ppc FP16 14ppc FP32 | 160ppc bilinear 80ppc FP16 40ppc FP32 | 80ppc bilinear 40ppc FP16 20ppc FP32 | 160ppc bilinear 80ppc FP16 40ppc FP32 | 80ppc bilinear 40ppc FP16 20ppc FP32 | 72ppc bilinear 36ppc FP16 18ppc FP32 |
| ROPs | 48 | 40 | 56 | 32 | 64 | 32 | 32 |
| GPixels/s throughput | 33.6 | 24.28 | 32.26 | 20.74 | 46.4 | 27.2 | 23.2 |
| GTexel/s bilinear | 42 | 33.99 | 92.2 | 51.84 | 116 | 68 | 52.2 |
| Board power (max) | 250W | 215W | 289W | 183W | 294W | 188W | 170W |
| Multi-GPU | Three-way SLI | Three-way SLI | Two-way SLI | Three-way SLI | Two-way XFire | Four-way XFire | Four-way XFire |
| Board length | 10.5in | 9.5in | 10.5in | 10.5in | 12in | 11in | 9.5in |
| Connectors (native) | 2x dual-link DVI Mini-HDMI | 2x dual-link DVI Mini-HDMI | 2 x dual-link DVI, HDTV-out,HDMI | 2x dual-link DVI HDTV-out | 2x dual-link DVI Mini-DisplayPort | 2x dual-link DVI HDMI, DisplayPort, | 2x dual-link DVI HDMI, DisplayPort, |
| Etail price | £440+ | £299+ | £350 | £285 | £550 | £310 | £225 |
*taken from Hexus.net
As you can see, it sucked so much power until you'll need at least an 600 watts PSU, if not mistaken with at least 40 amps for the direct power feed from PSU to the card.
Still, it proved to be the most fastest single GPU graphics card on the market side to side or even above the AMD HD5850/5870 cards in terms of performance.
If Nvidia starts to roll out some mid ranged cards, the current card prices will plummet and soon, people with 2 year old cards are able to upgrade at bargain price, especially the high end AMD HD4890 and the Nvidia GTX275 series cards.
On the price, you have to convert back to your currency for estimation and also the price may vary due third party manufacturer's pricing.
Well, I'll post some proprietary tech used by AMD and Nvidia to convince people buying their stuffs soon, especially how they works and why you need and wont need.
