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Fermi Arrives - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480

By Kenny Yeo - 27 Mar 2010

Dawn of War 2 & Battlefield Bad Company 2 Results

Dawn of War 2 & Battlefield Bad Company 2 Results

The GeForce GTX 480 didn't do too well on Dawn of War 2, finding itself pipped by the Radeon HD 5870, albeit by a very slight margin. The Radeon HD 5970 was the top performer, but its oddly consistent scores seem to suggest that it was bottlenecked by the CPU.

Interestingly, NVIDIA claims that when running Dawn of War 2, ATI cards by default demote the FP16 render targets to R11G11B10 render targets, which are half the size and less accurate. Admittedly, NVIDIA says that the change in quality is subtle, but it does have an affect on performance. We decided to investigate this claim by disabling Catalyst AI and found that it does affect performance by a considerable margin. Suffice to say that most users will normally be running with Catalyst AI enabled so this comparison below while technically correct, it's not representative of actual usage. Furthermore, since quality differences are small, it again makes sense for ATI to offer more performance.

Battlefield Bad Company 2 is one of the new benchmarks we are introducing and it is widely praised for its stunning graphics. It is a DirectX 11 game, but unfortunately the graphics settings are really basic, with no controls to allow for choosing which API to use or even enabling or disabling tessellation.

Here, the GeForce GTX 480 blitzed the Radeon HD 5870 by a significant margin. It was more than 20% quicker than the Radeon HD 5870 on both runs, and wasn't that far off the mark from the Radeon HD 5970. Note that the older generation cards maintained playable frame rates despite the intensive settings used.

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8.0
  • Performance 9.5
  • Features 8.5
  • Value 7
The Good
Untouchable single-GPU performance
3D Gaming
The Bad
Costly to own and run
Power-hungry
Runs incredibly hot
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