A new video from NVidia lets the Director of Technical Marketing Tom Peterson show off the new GTX480 in the Unigine Heaven benchmark and show the results compared to the Radeon HD 5870. Some interesting things to note about the demo:
- GPU Tessellation is a big deal. They have a great example of the power of the new tessellation features in use with the Dragon.
- 3-monitor 3D Vision looks nice
- The results are somewhere in the 1.5x-2.0x range over the Radeon (as shown above).
See the demonstration video below. What are your thoughts?
YouTube – GTX 480 Unigine and 3D Vision Surround Demo (GF100).
No matter how you look at it its not a fair comparison your taking a $700 card /300 watts requirement (Fermi gtx 480 ) vs $400 card /150 watt requirements (5870), ok so Fermi is tessellating better but they have to compare it to the $600 /300 watt (5970) to see the real winner in both price /performance and power usage.
the clear winner is ATI this round, (price point, performance, and power consumption)
@ Nick
“Note also that NVIDIA’s GTX480 or GTX470 GPUs are always compared to the AMD’s HD 5970 dual GPU card.”
Should read: “Note also that NVIDIA’s GTX480 or GTX470 GPUs are always compared to the AMD’s HD 5870 GPU card not the HD5970 dual GPU card.”
The problem with Fermi GPUs is that they do not include a hardware based tesselator. Tesselation is done in software by the CUDA cores. This is an approach that gives very good results when the content being displayed demands high levels of tesselation and nothing else. When the opposite is true, which is the norm, Fermi GPUs are not able perform as well as AMD Radeon HD5870 GPUs which have dedicated hardware-based tesselators. This is why NVIDIA has been very careful to release results for only a very short segment of the output from this particular benchmark as it provides for high tesselation.
Note also that NVIDIA’s GTX480 or GTX470 GPUs are always compared to the AMD’s HD 5970 dual GPU card. Although the later is a dual GPU card, it is the performance of the hardware that matters most, not how it is achieved. It is reported that it is expected that the HD5970 will probably hammer the GTX480 into the ground.
But these comparisons will be academic if Fermi-based GPU cards are only available in homeopathic numbers as seems likely.