GeForce G310 Fermi - Nvidia news! 2010

Final Considerations

nVIDIA will probably need a few months before they can offer a complete family of DirectX 11 GPUs for all market segments: while the GeForce GTX 480 and 470 are capable of attracting the enthusiast or passionate users, the most number of sales come from the lowest segments on the market, and it’s here that ATI is still ahead with their many options for all kinds of users.

The GPU market is always interesting and the competition only brings more options to the users, so we hope that nVIDIA will manage to close the gap in the months to come.

Final Considerations - Part 5

The feeling is that nVIDIA was indeed forced to accept such high energy consumptions in order to have solutions and technologies that would allow their cards to regain their place as the best single GPU cards in the market. The GPU GF100’s developing process was definitely longer and perhaps more troublesome than nVIDIA had expected; maybe the reason for the delay on these two first Fermi cards.

ATI was capable of managing their own DirectX 11 GPU line a lot better, presenting a complete family of GPUs in 6 months, with proposals that go from top-enthusiast to entry level. nVIDIA, with the two Fermi cards, wins the battle when it comes to pure performance, but when it comes to efficiency, the ATI Radeon HD 5000 cards are still with a big advantage.

Final Considerations - Part 4

Will users would benefit from these cards? If we think about the performance and price only, the answer is yes. They’re very fast cards, that implement a tesselation management that is more efficient than the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series, in terms of FPS. But if we put together the energy consumption and noise levels, then things change a little. While the performances are appealing, some users might complain about the noise levels, temperatures and energy consumptions the Fermi cards bring.

The energy consumption is a hot topic when it comes to graphic cards. ATI has managed to keep reasonable energy consumptions together with noticeable performance increases. nVIDIA, at least with these first Fermi cards, didn’t manage it at all. The performances did increase noticeably, but in this case, also the energy requirements and temperatures when under heavy stress.

Final Consideration - Part 3

The nVIDIA technologies are those that give the cards an extra value: PhysX, CUDA and 3D Vision come as additional reasons to buy nVIDIA cards and aren’t accessible with other brands. There are interesting PhysX implementations that allow users to experience physics effects in games in order to give a bigger realism. CUDA is also interesting for the GPU Computing usages, especially in professional levels. 3D Vision is a very interesting technology, but it requires two cards in SLI, which comes as a disadvantage for nVIDIA as ATI managed to implement Eyefinity in all their HD 5000 series without the need of an extra card.

This article won’t be giving any specific opinion on these technologies: they’re interesting, yes, but whether to choose an nVIDIA solution for them is completely up to the user.

Final Conclusions - Part 2

If before the launch it was thought that the GTX 400 series cards would have high consumption, it wasn’t perhaps expected to be this much. The tests have revealed that the level of energy consumption on the two new GF100 Fermi cards are much higher than any other card in the market, including the dual GPU architectures.

The high energy requirements mean the need for specific power supplies and a specific case as well, due to the amount of physical heat that the cards can reach, even in an open system.

Final Considerations - Part 1

There are a few points to consider when analyzing brand new cards such as the GTX 480 and 470. First and foremost, performances: the GTX 480 is the fastest single-GPU card currently on the market. nVIDIA has developed an 3-billion transistor architecture in order to come back to being the manufacturer with the fastest solution on the market.

The GTX 470 has 25% less performance than the 480 yet costs 30% less. The result is a very valid product both in performance, and with a price that remains between the HD 5870 and HD 5850. This card could be indeed the one to sell more from the new Fermi cards, both for the lower price but also due to the availability.

Just Cause 2

Just Cause 2 is an action game that features shooting scenes and driving sceens in a free-roaming world, in which the character can freely explore the game maps. It was developed with an AI system that allows the character to interact with the scenario and adapt to the situations in a dynamic way.

For this title, the sessions were done in DirectX 11, with all settings in high or very high. The ambient occlusion was selected but in a low level, and the Bokeh filter was disabled. Also enabled were the Anti-aliasing at 4x and the anisotropic filter at 16x. The resolutions chosen were 1920 x 1080 and 1680 x 1050.

GeForce GTX 480

- 1920 x 1080 - 64.4
- 1680 x 1050 - 71.9

GeForce GTX 470

- 1920 x 1080 - 52.5
- 1680 x 1050 - 58.5

Metro 2033

Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter developed by 4A Games. It was released not too long ago and it features one of the most advanced graphic engines in the market. Metro 2033 is based on a book by Dmitry Glukhovsky and features a post-apocalyptic scenario: a bunch of survivors have found safety beneath the Moscow subway, and there’s where the game takes place, while the surface on Earth is poisoned and destroyed. Metro 2033 is based on 4A Games’ own technology, and it supports DirectX 11.

In order to evaluate the performances with this game, the tool Fraps was used, recording the medium framerate. The resolutions chosen were 1680 x 1050 and 1920 x 1080, anisotropic filter 16x and no anti-aliasing, with the DirectX 11 APIs and settings in the maximum.

GeForce GTX 480

- 1920 x 1080 - 28.2
- 1680 x 1050 - 31.6

GeForce GTX 470

- 1920 x 1080 - 21.8
- 1680 x 1050 - 25.5

Battleforge

Battleforge, like many of the titles in this review, also features an internal game benchmark. In this specific case, each configuration option was set to high, except for shadows and effect quality, which were left in “medium”, and anti-aliasing at 4x.

GeForce GTX 480

- 2560 x 1600 - 91
- 1920 x 1200 - 126
- 1680 x 1050 - 145
- 1280 x 1024 - 162

GeForce GTX 470

- 2560 x 1600 - 73
- 1920 x 1200 - 112
- 1680 x 1050 - 125
- 1280 x 1024 - 146

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Batman: Arkham Asylum offers an integrated benchmark, that was executed using the very-high quality level and anti-aliasing 8x.

GeForce GTX 480

- 2560 x 1600 - 82
- 1920 x 1200 - 134
- 1680 x 1050 - 164
- 1280 x 1024 - 202

GeForce GTX 470

- 2560 x 1600 - 65
- 1920 x 1200 - 106
- 1680 x 1050 - 132
- 1280 x 1024 - 163

Batman: Arkham Asylum was commercialized as one of the main games following the “the way it’s meant to be played” motto by nVIDIA, and its internal configuration menu gives the possibility of managing the anti-aliasing only if an nVIDIA card is being used. For ATI cards, the solution is to force an anti-aliasing, which compromises the performances.