nVidia GTX480 Performance Test
8xMSAA
All of the previous pages show a performance gain of approximately 23%, but this page shows 27.15% overall. This proves yet again that older titles stand to benefit a lot from a GPU upgrade, often even more than new games. In particular, Serious Sam 2 and Fear 1 show very large performance gains of over 30%.
Also, the GTX470 was no faster than the GTX285 in Painkiller and Far Cry 1, but the GTX480 is a lot faster than either card. This proves it wasn’t a CPU limitation, but rather the GTX470 holding back performance. The GTX480 barely overtakes the GTX285 in Call of Duty 2 while the GTX470 was a lot slower than the latter.
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.