nVidia GTX480 Performance Test
8xS & 16xS
Like the GTX470, the GTX480 is absolutely terrible in Pacific Assault and Unreal Tournament 2004, coming in miles behind the GTX285. Fortunately we get solid performance gains in all games using 16xS, and the GTX480 is simply untouchable there.
The Quake 3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein scores are overkill even for such twitch shooters of yesteryear, so it’s probably time to raise the settings. The GTX480 has the same driver bug as the GTX470 in Quake 3 where the game is too dark; the same problem happens in Jedi Knight 2 and Call of Duty United Offensive.
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.