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***Nvidia GTX480 & 470 reviews & discussion***

Notice how the profile of the alien barely changes with tesselation on?

All the rough edges remain, but they just have more polygons between the untesselated ones.
 
kylew said:
Notice how the profile of the alien barely changes with tesselation on?

All the rough edges remain, but they just have more polygons between the untesselated ones.
Click to expand...

Exactly which is what a lot of other games doing and what Heaven set to extreme seems to do, sure Nvidia might do better if Tesselation is poorly used and set too high, but if used properly I doubt Nvidia would have much of an advantage over AMD.
 
Broken Hope said:
The problem with Tesselation is a lot of games currently and even the heaven benchmark are wasting a lot of GPU power for no increase in model quality.

Take this example No Tesselation Tesselation

The alien's tail has a ton more polygons in the tesselation image and yet it doesn't actually really alter how the tail looks at all, most of those extra polygons are doing nothing to increase the quality of the model but will be reducing performance for little gain.
Click to expand...
Indeed, though I'm not 100% convinced that they're actually doing it that naively. If they are then they may as well not bother.

The largest visual improvements you'll get from tesselation are when the original polygon (before sub-division) is side-on to the camera, doing it on a polygon with it's full aspect is towards the camera is just a waste of performance for no visual benefit vs. bump-mapping. The only exception to this would be in some particular lighting enviroments or reflective surfaces.

Ideally you would want to be able use a shader to skip tesselation on polygons with a low normal to eye angle. This would give a significant performance boost almost for free. This certainly should be possible, and I'd expect any devs not just phoning in a console port to do it if it is.

The nice thing about tesselation is that in theory its a technique that can be applied to almost everything without too much extra effort, since the production pipeline will already have heightmaps for every bump-mapped surface. You just have to get your algorithms right, which will come when games haven't just had it bolted on late in production (like AvP).
 
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kylew said:
Looking at ultimate performance, GTX480 Sli has absolutely no chance at matching overclocked HD5870s.

GTX480s have very very low overclocking headroom whereas 5870s have a lot of overclocking headroom, up to 20%.

So even if money is no issue, overclocked crossfire 5870s are going to give you much better performance than GTX480 SLi for 2/3 the cost. You'd have to be mad to choose the 480s for games.
Click to expand...

This is fine right up to the point the HD5870's run out of memory (something that can be seen with the HD5970 and very high resolutions / settings). f

Now 4GB (2x2GB) HD5870 CF on the other hand... :D
 
Think I'll be sticking with my 4870 for the near future. It has it's quirks (white ****ing boxes in Eve when HDR is on), but I'm thinking I will wait another six months or so before upgrading.
 
Flanno said:
Dunno if anyone has seen this, but maingear (they case guys nvidia used to pimp their fermis at various shows) benched tri sli 480's against 5970 quadfire :)

Makes some interesting reading - as suspected, suttering and low framrates in quadfire, and fermi scaling better in very high res with all details turned up. Having said that, they used nvidia reliables like Batman and Uniengine demo. But Crysis did seem to suck on 2x5970's.

http://www.maingearforums.com/entry.php?24-So-You-Want-To-Buy-A-GeForce-Part-2
http://www.maingearforums.com/entry.php?23-So-You-Want-To-Buy-A-GeForce
Click to expand...

ill read through the article now, but unless it was fixed, crysis doesnt scale beyond 3 gpus. It originally didnt scale past two, but that got fixed (for nvidia at least) through drivers/game patches.

But, since we all know scaling to more than 2 gpus isnt great, if your looking at 480SLI or TriSLI then surely is nothing better than it on the market atm.

But, to 99% of consumers, its not a worth while trade off. The "fatest" card has never been priced aggresivley in my experience, especially on launch day, where over here the prices are nearly 1$=1£ ffs. Which destroy's nvidias RRP and makes the cards seem very overpriced.

still, Water cooled Tri SLI = no heat problems, no noise issues, no dodgy scaling to 4 or more gpus, although admitedly, this is getting better all the time. Price though? 1350 (oddly what I guessed would be the whole in bank balance on release day). Add to that most likely £75 per water block, your looking at a £1575 graphics solution, and thats only if youve already got the rest of the loop. I also bought better fans for rad and case (was all yateloon ds12) since there will be more heat in it, so it brings it up to around £1650. Although it will decimate almost everything, even on multi screens at sill res.

I'm excited though, it is a waste of money, but i wanted metro 2033 to run in decent FPS with all eye candy turned on, at 2560, with AA. Nothing else could do this, so there was no other option, and if i wanted quadfire or something I would have had to chage mobo and cpu. Although in hindsight, it might have made better sense to get one less gtx480 and get an i7 and x58. Neverrmind, I can wait a while for intels net gen stuffs if i need it then.


Tl;DR
Its well expensive, but at the extreme high end ati can't currently compete with it. Heat and noise doesnt matter to those people. ATI are better bang per buck, and other than the 8800gt have been for quite a while.
 
Ch3m1c4L said:
ill read through the article now, but unless it was fixed, crysis doesnt scale beyond 3 gpus. It originally didnt scale past two, but that got fixed (for nvidia at least) through drivers/game patches.

But, since we all know scaling to more than 2 gpus isnt great, if your looking at 480SLI or TriSLI then surely is nothing better than it on the market atm.

But, to 99% of consumers, its not a worth while trade off. The "fatest" card has never been priced aggresivley in my experience, especially on launch day, where over here the prices are nearly 1$=1£ ffs. Which destroy's nvidias RRP and makes the cards seem very overpriced.

still, Water cooled Tri SLI = no heat problems, no noise issues, no dodgy scaling to 4 or more gpus, although admitedly, this is getting better all the time. Price though? 1350 (oddly what I guessed would be the whole in bank balance on release day). Add to that most likely £75 per water block, your looking at a £1575 graphics solution, and thats only if youve already got the rest of the loop. I also bought better fans for rad and case (was all yateloon ds12) since there will be more heat in it, so it brings it up to around £1650. Although it will decimate almost everything, even on multi screens at sill res.

I'm excited though, it is a waste of money, but i wanted metro 2033 to run in decent FPS with all eye candy turned on, at 2560, with AA. Nothing else could do this, so there was no other option, and if i wanted quadfire or something I would have had to chage mobo and cpu. Although in hindsight, it might have made better sense to get one less gtx480 and get an i7 and x58. Neverrmind, I can wait a while for intels net gen stuffs if i need it then.


Tl;DR
Its well expensive, but at the extreme high end ati can't currently compete with it. Heat and noise doesnt matter to those people. ATI are better bang per buck, and other than the 8800gt have been for quite a while.
Click to expand...

*Despair*

MMTS
 
its not for folding at home, since i dont leave my pc one when im not using it anymore, since its become a power hungry b****.

It is more a case of more money than sense, since i really dont care about the money, and want the best i can get, while putting in the least amount of effort (hence not wanting to do a complete move to a new mobo etc). It also "seemed" like less, as i bought two, read reviews, then bought a third, then the next day bought the fans etc, and wont have to buy the blocks for a while....until that post i hadnt actually counted it all up and realised that it costs more than a high spec gaming rig...just for graphics....which is stupid.

Still, can re-coupe some of the cost from selling 2 295s with blocks, and 3 months savings covers the rest :)


ONLY reason I can see for tri sli, is metro 2033 high res and stuffs. Beyond that, im guessing some future games will to. I know it makes more sense (still not sensible) to buy 2 now, and one later, or just get refreshes or w/e down the line when more stuff uses the power but meh. Im an impatiant git lol.


Also, as mentioned, it is coming up to BBQ season, and i currently dont own a BBQ. If i put a piece of foil on top of my case (where the extraction is) I should be able to cook stuffs right?
 
Ch3m1c4L said:
its not for folding at home, since i dont leave my pc one when im not using it anymore, since its become a power hungry b****.

It is more a case of more money than sense, since i really dont care about the money, and want the best i can get, while putting in the least amount of effort (hence not wanting to do a complete move to a new mobo etc). It also "seemed" like less, as i bought two, read reviews, then bought a third, then the next day bought the fans etc, and wont have to buy the blocks for a while....until that post i hadnt actually counted it all up and realised that it costs more than a high spec gaming rig...just for graphics....which is stupid.

Still, can re-coupe some of the cost from selling 2 295s with blocks, and 3 months savings covers the rest :)


ONLY reason I can see for tri sli, is metro 2033 high res and stuffs. Beyond that, im guessing some future games will to. I know it makes more sense (still not sensible) to buy 2 now, and one later, or just get refreshes or w/e down the line when more stuff uses the power but meh. Im an impatiant git lol.


Also, as mentioned, it is coming up to BBQ season, and i currently dont own a BBQ. If i put a piece of foil on top of my case (where the extraction is) I should be able to cook stuffs right?
Click to expand...


If you die from heat stroke (as your room will be about 45c with those going), can I have your Hazro?


Also, what PSU have you got? You're looking at upwards of 800w for the cards alone.
 
rypt said:
That's not more money than sense, that's just pure stupidity :/
Click to expand...

each to his own.....it`s his hobby so why not if that`s what he really wants. Fair play to him I reckon....my hobbies cost WAY more...£1500 isn`t so much to spend on what you enjoy most.....:D
 
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