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So ladies and gents, was fermi a fail after all?

Rroff said:
Not sure what forums you hang out on except for one of OcUK's competitor forums (which is very pro ATI/AMD) most of the main hardware tech ones like guru3d, xs, etc. are pretty similiar viewpoint wise to these.

EDIT: To be fair these forums are probably a little more pro 470 than is typical due to the deals they've done on them here and a good number picking them up at good prices.
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RavenXXX2 said:
Good for you, you must visit a limited number of forums, I'll take a -£200 480 and overclocked to 580 performance all year long.
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Actually I only use this one and XS, and I'm pretty sure that the GTX 480 + 470 werent very popular on XS, at least not when they were first launched for their noise, heat and power consumption, and those opinions were back when the cards were full price, not their current reduced prices at OCUK.
 
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Fermi, as an architecture, is a huge success. AMD is still playing catchup.

Fermi, as implemented in 470/480 was a fail due to unoptimised library.



so it is two fold. great overall architecture design. failed by incompetent IC engineers. i'm sure if the same Fermi architecture is given to Intel IC engineers, Fermi would be right the first time round.
 
Bought a 480 at launch. Was amazed at the speed but hated the heat and noise. Pushed ambient temps in my case right up and made a proper racket.

Then moved to 580 on launch and been extremely happy ever since. Quiet, super fast and relatively cool.

So as everyone else seems to be saying, the initial launch was a balls-up. But subsequent revisions have been excellent.
 
I do find people going on about costs to nvidia/stocks/shares etc. means it's a fail quite amusing.

None of that affects the end user unless you do have shares in nvidia. Final cost, performance, card size, power and thermals.

480's and 470's are hot and can get noisy when heavily oc'd while next to each other I'll give you that but my god they performed well, I also wear headphones when gaming 95% of the time. The pair of 480's I got to replace a pair of 5870's destroyed them at 1920x1200, and even more so at 5760x1200. Drivers are rock solid with the 480's so far (touch wood) whereas the ati's were all over the place.
Yes they consumed a fair bit of power but if I have an i7 and a trio of screens and I wanted low power, I'd use my netbook. As long as my hx1k is able to power my kit I don't care.

This is not a beef with ati in general as the single 5870 e6 2gb I have in my htpc is rock solid but I found crossfire/res scaling to be all over the place, things have improved but I found nvidias near problem free drivers made up for the hot and noisy side of things back then.

The 460's especially, were a hit and A generation later and things looking good, 5 series is coming along well and has had a good run so far, making good improvements over the initial gf100. Same can be said for the competition, the 6 series scale better than the 5 in cfx and the new drivers are coming along nicely.

I speak purely from my experience, in summary for the end user, they rocked but didn't come without caveats. They have since been refined and have lost much of the initial complaints.

Looking forward to the next generation after the 5 series. :D
 
Fermi as an architecture is sound, the revision of the architecture has proved this.

The GTX 470 /GTX 480 cards themselves are far less impressive, however.

If they weren't so bloody noisy (lets face it, heat/power can kiss my ass as long as the card is quiet!!!) they would be worth my time.

They do have ONE big win over any current ATI/AD card though, and that is Tesselation performance.

Lets face it, even the HD6950/70 are rather lacklustre in this area compared to their fermi counterparts, barely matching the GTX 460/GTX560 in tesselation performance.

And as we are in somewhat of a graphical lull at the moment (thanks consoles!), these cards are likely to be great performers for a Very long time, time enough for games with Tesselation to be released and to possibly show the weakness of the ATi offerings.
 
jigger said:
Fermi has failed pritty badly in every aspect. Easily the worse GPU architecture Nvidia have put into production.
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No the 5x00 series was nvidia's worst gpu architecture. I am of the belief that gpu sales of an architecture make or break it and in this case fermi is a flop as nv are trailing well behind in dx11 cards sold. It was not just sales that made fermi a flop for me. Nvidia's reputation had been taking a battering for a good while before fermi was launched due to dodgy business practises and all fermi did was make things worse.

So for me its more of a flop but in fairness most fermi cards perform well and i would not be dissapointed if i had one in my machine.
 
jigger said:
The 5900's made a full range and had reasonably good availability. Fermi has been far worse.
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From what i remember the 5800 was the fermi of today but with another disadvantage, it was slower than the 9800 which makes it worse to me. At least fermi can claim the fastest gpu crown. They are definately on par with each other in most respects though.
 
TheRealDeal said:
From what i remember the 5800 was the fermi of today but with another disadvantage, it was slower than the 9800 which makes it worse to me. At least fermi can claim the fastest gpu crown. They are definately on par with each other in most respects though.
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Well ok... maybe-ish.

The thing is you couldn't buy one for love nor money for six months and then the GTX480 cost more than even the HD5970.

To truly win the performance crown the card really should have lived up to it promise and offered HD5970 performance six moths earlier
 
kylew said:
Yeah!!!!!!!!! The more power a graphics card pulls, and the more it costs means it's more premium!!!!!!!!!! Premium means millions of FPS!!!!!!!!

Derp.
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Who really cares about power usage? a lot of people here buy components for there price/performance or just shear amazing performance regardless of heat or power usage. (example being all the people who bought a gtx480 and didnt care?)

o and
Grammar_Nazi_Logo_Dude_for_real-s180x180-125049-535.jpg
Herp de derp de diddly derp
 
jigger said:
Well ok... maybe-ish.

The thing is you couldn't buy one for love nor money for six months and then the GTX480 cost more than even the HD5970.

To truly win the performance crown the card really should have lived up to it promise and offered HD5970 performance six moths earlier
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You could them quite easily within weeks of release
 
trisp said:
Who really cares about power usage? a lot of people here buy components for there price/performance or just shear amazing performance regardless of heat or power usage. (example being all the people who bought a gtx480 and didnt care?)
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You completely missed the point he was making.
 
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