GTX470 Performance Test Part 1: Windows XP
Conclusion
On XP the GTX470 is currently slower than the GTX285. It’s as simple as that. Moments of brilliance are vastly overshadowed by abysmal performance almost everywhere else.
Obviously the GTX285 doesn’t have a problem with either XP or my choice of settings, but the GTX470 does. So either XP’s driver isn’t optimal for the GTX470, or it’s a problem with nVidia’s GTX470 driver in general. Retesting on Windows 7 will answer that question soon enough.
The card is also much louder than the GTX285, even when sitting inside a solid steel Antec 902 with excellent cooling. My GTX285 often wouldn’t raise its fan much past idle speed during extended gaming sessions, but the GTX470 often spins up within seconds of entering a game, and it sounds like a hairdryer on a low setting. You will hear this card when gaming, even when wearing headphones like I do.
On the plus side, the GTX470 is about an inch shorter than the GTX285 which means it won’t overhang your motherboard, and hence might fit into smaller cases.
So that’s it for the XP results, but stay tuned for part two of this article where I’ll retest the GTX470 on Windows 7 (64 bit).
Pros
- Much faster than the GTX285 in a handful of situations.
- Best AF in consumer space.
- Rotated and sparse grid super-sampling in DX10/DX11 and OpenGL.
- TrAA can be decoupled from MSAA.
- Open and flexible profile system allows complete control over your gaming library.
- 1280 MB memory for demanding games.
- Relatively short for a high-end card.
Cons
- Current performance on XP is abysmal compared to the GTX285.
- Not always cost and/or performance competitive with ATi cards.
- Cooler is loud under load.
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Surely this is a driver issue. As gamers we want to play our old games as well as our new one’s.
Part of the fun of upgrading is that we get to see an FPS boost in our old games.
Tesselation is all well and good, but no-body is using it yet and I hope there is a higher take up of DX11 than there was of DX10.
Gearing a card for the future is all well and good but predicting the future isn’t exactly an exact science!
I agree completely. Fortunately I’ve seen this issue many times before, and the good news is that driver improvements can fix things.
The GTX285 has “gold standard” driver performance, so it’s tough for any new release driver to compete with it initially.
What will be really interesting is how Windows 7 compares.
To the above – but the GTX470 performs well on Windows 7. It seems that nVidia have rightfully given up on xp.
We’ll see about that, Bakes.
Windows 7 might not change things at all because I don’t benchmark like the standard fare. I use far more games, along with unorthodox gaming settings compared to regular reviews.
As always, outstanding job BFG10K.
Any “early leaks” from the Win7 results? 😉
Yeah, so far Windows 7 is behaving differently in some of the games.
It seems that many of the older games are so dependent on the TMU muscle for performance.
After looking at the “Part 2” Win7 comparison, I see that Prey, Doom 3, and Far Cry 2 perform so much better but UT2004, one of my favorites, performs considerably worse (maybe after Nvidia fixed it thanks to you pointing out the stuttering issue on Vista a while ago, so it’s still a driver problem?). Overall, Win7 is much better though (except for a few unrelated sound issues).
thanks, great article!
The Unreal 2 engine stuttering was only present on XP, and was later fixed. I don’t think the low UT2004 performance is related in any way, but rather the problem is specific to the GF100, on both OSes.