Now that benchmarks are flourishing all over the net, I hope that someone very soon will put hands on a 470 (or even a 480) and will crunch Gpugrid wus. For sure, gpucomputing isn't part of a "standard" bench...
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Excellent review (as always) from Guru3d at: GTX 480 Review Guru3d

The hardware based tessellation is superb, and the new 32AA mode promises much better graphics quality.

Power, as widely flagged up pre release is horrendous - adding 250w to base system+single card for each card in SLI is going to eat up PSUs, and will need to go up a PSU in many cases. That will give many pause for thought. GTX 480 Power needs

The clear performance improvement of 10% or so over a 5870 is not reflected in the 3DMark - usually with Guru3d reviews that benchmark is not far off the real world game tests they do, no so this time - as its a benchmark its academic as real world use obviously has more credence, but interesting non the less. 3DMark Vantage (DirectX 10) Performance

GTX295 appears to be EOL, in practice if not formally as they dont make them any more. So in the world of NVidia and CUDA, Fermi is it. Lets hope there are are others lower down the totem pole (aka 420/430/440 whatever), cant believe there will not be - because without them they will have a hard time against the "average" PC User & ATI due to cost and power.

I get the impression its "unfinished business" and there is much more there to come if they can only sort out power needs. At 250w TDP its going to be one hell of a hot mother .... and will need a PSU one step above the "norm", and a review of case cooling for high end users. As for 2/3/4 of them in SLI ....

Personaly, given the funds and availability, I'll probably end up getting one as my second box has a 600W PSU anyway - but only because of the impending new GPUGrid Project. Without any CUDA needs, I would not buy one, the power, heating, and cost are just too much in comparison to 5970/5870, and those aspects are not offset enough by performance increases worthwhile taking the pain in those areas in my personal situation - everyone has their own needs and drivers of course.

Overall, nice card, performs well, shame about heat and power, and I wish they had come out with this last year .... it will keep them in touch with ATI, but will not set the graphics race alight until mid term refresh or Fermi2.

Regards
Zy

I'll be sticking with my 216-core GTX260 for now because I can't afford an upgrade, but the specs are incredible. It looks like the card is made using 40nm manufacturing tech, maybe they'll be able to shrink the die to 32nm by the time I have enough to $ get myself one.

not really excited. Performance wise against my OC'ed GTX275 - from 0% to 50%, mainly - 25-35%. Really not that much. I'm not sure what Anand talking about - just tens %s only.

Power consumption - I've got good 720W PSU, so it's not an issue for me. But: moving towards 40nm process ATI half-year ago managed to go down below 200W even for 5870. Nvidia's lower-end GTX470 consumes more...

Heat. This is a problem. Running 24/7 that hot GPU IMO requires certain measures for better cooling. I've got CM HAF932, so it should not be that bad for me, but still...

Voltage tweaking. Another problem. It's really pity that it I fix heat problem somehow, I can not OC the card beyond granted 100 MHz limit.

Price. Well overpriced against ATI.

I general - I did not disappointed, coz I was ready :-) see next door thread, that information was right, even about Vantage :-) Will I consider to buy it? At least not A3 revision. And again - it make sense to get dual GPU card for GPUGRID, which will be available in Q3 this year. BTW, early Q3 ATI releasing 28nm cards (5890 & 5990?) and nvidia will release 28nm cards next year only (fermi2 - may be).

Zydor
thx for the link :-)
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Anand says at folding a GTX480 is 3.5 times faster than a GTX285. Impressive!

MrS

ExtraTerrestrial Apes,

I know that u r talking about F@H :-) I can not understand from where 3.6 times appearing. I see no reasons for this... But let's wait to see real RAC 480 can provide.

nVidia is using many more transistors than ATI, so what? they are 5-10% only faster then 5870...

about voltage tweaking. I'm absolutely agree that it's necessary to do smth with heat, but I got water cooling or Accelero Extreme - why I can do nothing?

about ATI. Global Foundaries (Fab 1 in Dresden) almost done with 28nm process and they will be ready in Q3 to produce 5890 & 5990. and furthermore - ATI is not happy with TSMC (famous story with 4770 last summer), but at that time Fab1 was not ready for 5xxx cards and ATI could not wait to release them, so they came up TSMC.
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http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/forum_thread.php?id=1626

NVIDIA is limiting the double-precision speed of the desktop GF100 part to one-eighth of single-precision throughput, rather than keep it at half-speed, as per the Radeon HD 5000-series

The discussion has split into two threads - and I have a feeling neither side has realised the different mindset being used for the figures and logic in response.

The figures and discussion re the MW thread and Anand review et al turn around the DirectCompute/CUDA aspects of the card, and the crippling or otherwise of the various elemnts to do with the Compute functions (DirectCompute/CUDA software et al). Hence the figures of 6 or 3.5 or 40% et al.

That has nothing to do with the other side of the thread where individuals are taking about the real world make up of the card, shader performance, memory speed, power useage, and end user delivered performance figures.

Take one set of figures from the Compute side and refer to them against the user end side of the card (or visa versa) and confusion reigns supreme :) Its chalk and cheese ...

Scientific/Developer focus is on the Compute capabilities, by in large us mere crunching mortals focus on the real world end performance of the beast. Two different mindsets, two unrelated sets of figures, and two conversations going on in parrallel where neither side has twigged the basis of the figures from the other side of the conversation :)

Regards
Zy

Guys I do understand what u r talking about. I'm really curious to see real RAC of GTX400 in GPUDRID or F@H or whatsoever, coz these reviews all about fps in games and that's not we are looking for, right? :-)

Pls post here about real productivity of GTX400.
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So there are two different arguments. But like it or not, they do correlate. How? Many who crunch on GPUDRID.net are said to have middle to high end GPU's. That not everybody has the funds, or interest, in buying a high end GPU, simply to crunch 24/7, brings in mind the motivation to buy a Fermi.

GPUGRID.net uses these Nvidia GPU's with superior compute capabilities, & that's great for GPUDRID.net & great for Nvidia. But if it's only good for GPUDRID.net, then unless I'm a super fan, I'm probably not going to buy a Fermi, if the only thing good about it is the compute capability, if I only use that for GPUGRID.net

If the selling argument is CUDA, then more software needs to suport & use CUDA in order for a niche to be the reason & motivation behind spending $350-$500 on a new GPU that eats lots of power & doesn't offer something that other GPU's can't offer. That's just my opinion of things.
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Me personally - I do not mind to spend $200 on GTX470 (get it for $350 and sell my GTX275 for $150), but if GTX470 will worth these $200, i.e. it will be at least twice faster then GTX275. Other then that - it's just wasting of money and makes no sense at all.

Games - I'm not that great gamer, just 2-3 hours on Friday and Saturday nights to shoot bastards - and I'm done :-)

But again - heat is a real issue for us. Cooling system is way weaker against GTX480, so I'm in doubt if GTX470 can handle that much. And to buy GTX480 just for cooling system - it's ridiculous :-)

Voltage tweaking - I agree, if GPU that hot on stock voltage, I'm pretty scared to increase beyond stock voltage.

So, to make long story short - I'm curious to see real result of GTX470 in computation.
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I don't see much of a controversy: for games GF100 is clearly not the best solution, period. For compute there's potential, but we don't know enough yet.

MrS

If you test a GTX480 or GTX470, be very carefull. it may kill your Fermi.
On a german hardeware-side they tested a GTX470 with folding@home

http://www.hartware.de/review_1079_16.html


In short:
during the tests, the fan turnt to max.(3000rpm) because of the great heat, and during th test the fan-control failed, the rpm dropped down and the chip went up to 112°C, followed by black screen and freeze. fortunately, the chip was not damaged.
So, crunching on a Fermi seems to hit the chip very hard, if you have no good cooling in your case you will be in trouble.

Sandro

Thx a lot for the post :-) On top of what u just told, in the bottom of the page there nice table comparing GTX285 and GTX470. I'm not that good in German, but as fas as I understood - GTX470 faster the GTX285 on 17-22% ONLY. That's it, not that much at all. And I'm still not sure what Anand was talking about - "3.6 times faster"...
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Yes, that was strange, the reason may be that they tested with a beta app of f@h, they got from NV directly.

Nvidia stellte kurz vor dem Ende der Testzeit eine Beta-Version des Folding@Home Programms zur Verfügung, das die neuen GeForce Grafikkarten unterstützt. Die Berechnungen finden dabei ausschließlich auf dem Grafikchip statt, der Prozessor wird nicht belastet und steht für andere Aufgaben zur Verfügung.

Yes, that was strange, the reason may be that they tested with a beta app of f@h, they got from NV directly.

One of the best german computer-webpages have tested the cuda performance of GF100, too, but they couldn´t get the performance like Anandtech. Only 30% speedup in F@H and Badaboom compared to a GTX285. You can read the results (in german) here.

I read couple of other review and all of them saying about "tens %" but not "times" advantage over GTX285 in F@H.
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im no expert on molecular dynamics but it runs well on stream processors. the gtx480 should be excellent because it has a cache that can act as a bandwidth cushion when you have overlapping gathers. fermi also has the ability to put register spills into cache. this can help performance A LOT. if you are spilling registers your performance is terrible. (i.e. 5870 performing as fast as a 8800GT). the new arch makes it easier to write compilers due to unified address space. this all translates to great performance.