nVidia GTX480 Performance Test
Introduction
After my rather disappointing foray into using a GTX470 as a performance upgrade for my GTX285, it’s now time to test a GTX480 to see if it can improve the situation.
Here are the specs of the cards I’ll be testing today:
As usual the games will be tested at the settings I usually play them at. Where possible, archived driver results from the GTX285 running on XP (32 bit) using driver version 197.13 will be used as a baseline. After all, performance gains from the GTX480 don’t mean much if the card still can’t significantly beat the GTX285.
1st of all overclocking the CPU will boost the performance of GTX 470 and 480.
2nd it will be nice to upgrade to nvidia 260.63
3rd why testing games that nobody plays nowadays?
I think that if you got oney to spend an upgrade from gtx 285 to fermi (even gtx 470) is ok. Keep in mind that na OC gtx 470 match a stock gtx 480.
Believe it or not, people do play older games. I still play a lot of older games (more than 3-4 years old) today.
An oc’ed GTX 470 can hardly match a stock 480. It would have to be oc’ed like hell (800MHz or so, with memory at like 4200MHz).. and don’t forget that the 480 can be oc’ed as well.
I do agree with you though that 2.8GHz is rather low for the CPU. It should’ve been at least 3.33GHz to match the high-end CPU offering, which should go hand-in-hand with high-end GPU. Heck, my i7 920’s are oc’ed to 4GHz on air.
You guys are falling into the common trap of vastly overstating CPU requirements. An i5 750 @ stock is absolute overkill for those games at the settings I run them at. I’ll prove this with an i7 870 review I have coming up.
I’ve already tested the first page (1920×1200) and there’s absolutely no performance change.
Cool, but the first page is consisted of newer games that are multi-threaded and GPU-limited. Older games on the last page, like for example UT2004, are not multi-threaded, and on my PC, when I overclock my i7 920 from 2.66GHz to 4GHz, I see a huge increase in frame rates in some parts that still max out my i7’s single core clocked at 4.1GHz during intense firefights in Onslaught mode. Frame rates still dip below the 85fps online cap, and when it’s at 2.66GHz, they are much more noticeable and frequent. Just letting ya know.. it was one of the main reasons I upgraded my CPU!
Even if you ignore nVidia’s performance problems in UT2004, you’d have to come up with a very synthetic situation to make the CPU the bottleneck at my settings (2560×1600 with 8xS).
Also don’t forget turbo boost, which will overclock the CPU in single-threaded games. My i7 870 will hit 3.6 GHz if only one core is loaded.