extremetech.com — It's taken a long time, but Nvidia has finally released its first DirectX 11 graphics card, the GeForce GTX 480. The spiritual successor to last year's GTX 285 is meant to compete with AMD's highest-powered single-GPU card, the ATI Radeon HD 5870.
Mar 26, 2010 View in Crawl 4
soretoMar 27, 2010
I wouldn't, but if the GTX480 is better I don't care how much more it costs, and apparently it is 10 - 15% faster.
Closed AccountMar 27, 2010
Other than gaming, does this card have anything over AMD/ATI I should know about? Otherwise I'm not interested in nVidia this time round.
twwixMar 28, 2010
The FERMI's were definitely overhyped.I'll wait for a price drop and a revision of the GTX 470. One with better cooling and hopefully with the other cores turned on. If they don't release it within this year, i am switching back to ATI. This overclocked GTX 260 Core 216 has served me well but it's starting to show its age.
awezingMar 28, 2010
I'm using the same card (superclocked edition), but I bought another one and put it into SLI and it performs perfectly.
honoredmuleMar 28, 2010
It doesn't work that way. Tessellation isn't merely a "geometry trick." It requires processing that has nothing to do with the standard rendering or shading pipelines. It's a uniquely advanced interpolation algorithm with a bloody lot of finicky details to handle. Generating data is never a simple matter, much less so in this case.Yes, the programmable capabilities could have been co-opted to support tessellation...so poorly that you'd be better off using the CPU, while consuming resources normally available for other generalized processing besides (like physics). Even if they did, it's not clear they'd even be allowed to label it as a DX11 card, since that label is reserved for a specified set of /innate hardware capabilities/."A new shading architecture" would have been a simpler proposition to support in software (which is exactly what any driver-enabled support is, regardless of whether it taps existing GPU capabilities). But anything that has to go through a de-abstraction layer in the driver will simply never be performant on the same order of magnitude as true, end-to-end hardware support.
philbertMar 28, 2010
Maybe some day Open CL will be able to cut it. Right now that just doesn't help me.
renegadeafkMar 28, 2010
Windows releases were typically every couple of years before the whole longhorn/vista debacle.7 wasn't all that long after vista, definitely not as long as xp to vista.
kwipperMar 28, 2010
...and ATI wins the DX11 war.