GTX 480 vs. HD 5870, 8x AA Performance Analysis, Part 3
Conclusion
This conclusion is a short one and it dictates itself just as the last one did. The HD 5870 still maintains good 8x AA performance as did the HD 4000 series and it will in many cases catch the stock GTX 480 or surpass it when performance is already reasonably close. However, the GTX 480 also turns in respectable 8xAA numbers – especially compared to the weakness of the last GT200 series. We see the GTX 480 run even further away from the HD 5870 in some new games with 8xAA enabled. This bodes very well for GF100 Fermi architecture and indicates that NVIDIA has very solid scalable new architecture to build on although it is still on an improving process.
We look forward to seeing what NVIDIA its partners have in store with future variants of GTX 480 and the rest of the Fermi GeForce family. We also look forward to AMD’s response beyond overclocking its current HD 5870. This has been quite an enjoyable five-week hand’s on experience for us in comparing GTX 480 versus HD 5870 and with each video card solidly overclocked and now tested at 8xAA.
We feel privileged to bring you our very first overclocked benchmarks and performance testing of GTX 480 versus HD 5870. We like it so much so that we will make this a series until we have covered this subject in depth. Next up, we take a break from this series as we explore the new PowerColor HD 5870 PCS+ and pit it against our reference Diamond HD 5870 and we also overclock each card. As we return to Part Four, we also expect to explore GTX 480 SLI versus HD 5870 CrossFire and NVIDIA’s claims of incredible scaling to 90% or so under Windows 7.
In the meantime, feel free to comment below, ask questions or have a detailed discussion in our ABT forum. If you have any requests on what you would like us to focus on for Part Four, or for any other information, please join our ABT forum.
Mark Poppin
ABT Senior Editor
Please join us in our Forums
Become a Fan on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
For the latest updates from ABT, please join our RSS News Feed Join our Distributed Computing teams
- Folding@Home – Team AlienBabelTech – 164304
- SETI@Home – Team AlienBabelTech – 138705
- World Community Grid – Team AlienBabelTech
Please take into consideration that nVidia uses a different version of AntiAliasing starting 8x and up, therefore comparisons are henceforth limited at best. Sadly I don’t have a direct link right now, but please take it into consideration before drawing (final) conclusions.
We took special care to make sure that identical AA settings were applied in all of our benchmarks including for Crysis. We even noted that in the full retail game, Just Cause 2, that we observed the benchmark results showed the Radeon was running at 8xCSAA while the GeForce was 8xAA.
However, we have since learned from AMD that the benchmark results are wrongly identifying 8xMSAA as CSAA. The Radeon is actually running 8xMSAA and this minor issue will be addressed in a future patch.
Everything we test is “apples to apple” unless it is specified in the review.
Nice article man. Cheers
good