Wrapping Things Upward

Although we tested these high-end graphics cards with only seven games nosotros feel information technology was a solid and representative line up. A few new games were included such as Metro 2033, Just Crusade ii and Battleground Bad Company 2, while some older even so nonetheless pregnant games for measuring graphics card performance were included similar Crysis Warhead and S.T.A.L.K.Due east.R.: Call of Pripyat.

The GeForce GTX 480 vs. Radeon Hd 5870 comparing certainly didn't turn out as we were expecting, specially given what nosotros had already seen in our original comparing, where the GeForce GTX 480 was on average 16% faster. Now with newer drivers we were expecting this margin to open up up a little, farther favoring the Nvidia graphics card.

This was non to exist equally the margins announced to have been reduced instead. Of course, we accept changed our testing methodology for this commodity by using FRAPS to measure functioning, while the focus was more on real-fourth dimension gameplay instead of time demos. For the near part the GeForce GTX 480 and Radeon HD 5870 delivered like results which again was a petty surprising.

Games such as Battleground Bad Company 2, Resident Evil 5 and Wolfenstein showed nigh no difference in performance between the ii higher-end cards, generally favoring the GeForce but by slim margins. Some other surprising prepare of results were found when testing with Crysis Warhead. The GeForce GTX 480 was just ~3fps faster when measuring both the minimum and boilerplate frame rates, which is considerably less than what we observed last fourth dimension using a time demo. After on we observed this radical alter came from the maxed-out 'Enthusiast' setting we used for this article, compared to the 'High' setting used previously. On the latter GeForce boards tend to perform meliorate than the Radeon boards.

The biggest performance margins where playable functioning was still obtained were seen when testing with Southward.T.A.Fifty.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat and Only Cause 2. The GeForce GTX 480 was on average 5fps faster in South.T.A.L.Thou.E.R.: Call of Pripyat with Tessellation enabled, while on Just Cause 2 we saw a similar trend taking the lead by a comfortable margin in both average and minimum fps*.

Finally, the GeForce GTX 480 dominated Metro 2033 by a 7fps margin with Tessellation enabled, though with an average of 28fps and a minimum of only 21fps this was a hollow victory. At 1920x1200 we feel Tessellation is better off disabled in order to achieve smoothen gameplay and doing so still leaves the GeForce GTX 480 on top for this game.

The GeForce GTX 470 vs. Radeon HD 5850 comparison can be summed upward much more easily. The Radeon Hd 5850 was without a uncertainty the superior performer in our testing, washing abroad the GeForce GTX 470 in all just two games. Even when the GeForce GTX 470 hit the lead when playing Metro 2033 and S.T.A.L.K.Due east.R.: Call of Pripyat information technology was past a small ane-ii fps margin on boilerplate.

Take into business relationship that the GeForce GTX 470 sells for ~$l more than ($350) and the choice becomes quite obvious. In fact, value is the real showstopper for Nvidia's electric current generation GPUs in our stance. Although the GeForce GTX 480 is unquestionably a animal, at $500 information technology is an expensive one that sells for a $seventy-$100 premium over the Radeon Hard disk drive 5870.

And so two months later, both AMD and Nvidia take delivered new drivers for their current generation GPUs and very little has changed. The GeForce GTX 480 is still very fast, on the expensive side, and very ability hungry. The Radeon Hard disk 5870 on the other hand is almost equally fast, it'due south a better value per dollar, and much more fuel efficient. For those reasons alone the Radeon HD 5870 still gets our seal of approval.

Update: If y'all want to see operating temperatures and power consumption figures, yous can refer back to our previous review.

Update 2*: Mea culpa. When we published this operation review earlier this week, we unintentionally disregarded two Nvidia-specific settings that are bachelor in Just Cause 2 (Bokeh Filters and GPU H2o Simulation). These CUDA features are enabled by default when selecting the 'High' preset and thus negatively impacted performance making for an unfair comparing against the ATI Radeon boards. The updated graphs reflect an accurate measure of apples vs. apples performance.

Update iii: Since publishing this article we have received numerous feedback, but we are glad to study the only glaring issue was with the Merely Cause 2 numbers (run across the above note). Nosotros recently too tested with i additional game, Aliens vs. Predator, here are the graphs if y'all want to check those out.