Benchmarking Nvidia’s GTX 480 Fermi AIB
Posted by Jon Peddie on March 30th 2010 | Comments Closed
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Last week in Boston at the PAX conference Nvidia officially announced the GTX 480 and 470 AIBs based on the GF100 Fermi GPU. We’ve written it up in this issue of TechWatch (see page 1.)
The board is unremarkable in its appearance, and we could not find any wood screws. As you might have heard, some who saw early versions of Fermi AIBs claimed to have spotted wood screws holding the thing together – evidence that the boards were mock-ups.
We tested the Nvidia GTX 480 in 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), and also with 32-bit Vista.
Testing the Nvidia GTX 480
We ran benchmarks on the new Nvidia AIB and compared them to an ATI HD5870 and calculated corresponding Pmarks.
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 100 to put it in the same range as the 3D Vantage scores.
ATI beats Nvidia in the Pmark on price and power consumption and comes within 2.5% of the Vantage score.
Vantage
We ran the two boards at four resolutions in Vantage with AA on.
Nvidia did better at the low resolutions with AA turned off, but that’s hardly a configuration an enthusiast gamer would use with an AIB that costs almost $500. Nvidia has made a big investment in geometry processing in the GGF100 GPU and so Nvidia and its fans will be looking for tests that bring out that capability. Unigine is one such test.
Unigine’s Heaven
Unigine gives the tessellation engines in direct 11 a workout. You can see the added detail in the models as the benchmark runs, and it is a beautiful benchmark.
The high-resolution and filter loaded (8X AA, 16X AF, all lights on) is a real stress test.
The Nvidia GTX 480 beats the ATI HD5870 on average by 13% if you don’t include the hi-res 8X AA scores. The ATI HD5870 almost wouldn’t run at the extreme resolution with AA at 8X, here is where Nvidia’s additional memory (1536 as compared to ATI’s 1024) comes into play.
Resident Evil
Another popular DirectX 11 test is the benchmark scene in resident Evil
Similar to the Unigine results, The Nvidia GTX 480 beats the ATI HD5870 on average by 11%, and you can see the GTX 480 pull away at the higher resolutions making good use of its larger frame buffer.
Is Windows 7 faster?
Yes, when using Vantage.
We ran Vantage on the ATI HD5870 and the Nvidia GTX480 under Windows 7 and Vista and Windows 7 outperformed Vista by an average of 2.1% across all tests and both boards.
However, Windows 7 ran faster than Vista on the ATI HD5870 than it did on the Nvidia GTX480 -2.6% average across all tests as compared to 1.5% across all tests for the Nvidia GTX 480.
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Commenting is not available in this section entry.Jon Peddie
Dr. Jon Peddie is a pioneer of the graphics industry, starting his career in computer graphics in 1962. After the successful launch of several graphics manufacturing companies, Peddie began Jon Peddie Associates in 1984 to provide comprehensive data, information and management expertise to the computer graphics industry. With those same goals in mind, he left JPA to form Jon Peddie Research in 2001 to provide a more customer intimate environment for clients, and to further explore the business of multimedia. Peddie lectures at numerous conferences on topics pertaining to graphics technology and the emerging trends in digital media technology. Recently named one of the most influential industry analysts, he is frequently quoted in trade and business publications, and contributes articles to numerous publications including as well as appearing on CNN and TechTV, and a contributor to Advances in Modeling, Animation, and Rendering. Peddie is also the author of several books including Graphics User Interfaces and Graphics Standards, High Resolution Graphics Display Systems, and Multimedia and Graphics Controllers. Jon Peddie is recognized as one of the leading analysts in the country by AdWeek Magazine.
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