The competition between Nvidia and ATI, the premier graphic cards manufacturers, has been a classic battle with each outdoing the other every few months with the unveiling of cutting-edge graphics cards. However, with the launch of the highly acclaimed Radeon HD 5870, the first video card with DirectX 11 support, ATI seemed to have taken somewhat of a lead over Nvidia. Experts and gamers waited with bated breath to see what Nvidia would be coming up with – and they did not disappoint.
So far, the only video card from Nvidia that stood in direct competition with the Radeon 5870 was the GeForce GTX 295 but that lacked many of the features of the ATI card and was also far more expensive. Finally, Nvidia did launch a graphics card that not only matched the ATI Radeon 5870 almost feature to feature but also displayed some incredibly unique capabilities in its new GeForce GTX 480.
If one looks at the architecture of the GeForce GTX 480, one notices that it is built on the GF 100 Fermi Architecture, running a speed of 700 MHz on the core, 924 MHz on the GDDR5 memory and 1401 MHz on the shader cores. The processing unit consists of four GPU clusters and this contains the 480 CUDA cores, 15 streaming multiprocessors, 60 Texture units, and 48 Raster Operations. Sufficient frame memory is allotted with a 1536MB frame buffer memory running through a 384-bit bus. This easily delivers 177.4 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
However, what is most impressive about the GeForce GTX 480 is the significant increase in performance that it delivers even when compared to the ATI Radeon HD 5870. While many had expected Nvidia to come up with a video card that would match up to the ATI card in performance, it has exceeded all expectations by outperforming other video cards in many benchmark tests by a mile. In fact, when it came to enhancing the quality of the latest games or DirectX 11 games, it was found that the GeForce GTX 480 far outdid the competition.
As performance tests have shown, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 is undoubtedly a graphics card designed for superior gaming and digital media performance. However, its biggest advantage lies in the fact that there is so much more that this graphics card is capable of supporting and enhancing. For example, applications that are mainly GPU based such as Photoshop, Vreveal, Badaboom work better and faster with Nvidia GeForce GTX 480. Though Nvidia had introduced its stereoscopic 3D vision system sometime back, with the GeForce GTX 480, it can be supported over three monitors providing users a new way of enjoying this technology. Of course, along with the increase in performance levels, the GeForce GTX 480 does raise some concerns over the additional power consumption and heat production.
All in all, with GeForce GTX 480 NVIDIA has managed to improve on almost all the technological aspects while at the same time providing better gaming performance with superior visual quality.
Specifications:
|
|
Graphics Card
|
GeForce GTX 470
|
GeForce GTX 480
|
|
Processing Units
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Graphics Processing clusters
|
4
|
4
|
|
Streaming Multiprocessors
|
14
|
15
|
|
CUDA Cores
|
448
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480
|
|
Texture Units
|
56
|
60
|
|
ROP Units
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40
|
48
|
|
Clock Speeds
|
Graphics Clock (Fixed Function Units)
|
607Mhz
|
700Mhz
|
|
Processor Clock (CUDA Cores)
|
1281Mhz
|
1401Mhz
|
|
Memory clock rate(Clock Rate/Data Rate)
|
837MHz (3348MHz)
|
924 MHz(3696 MHz)
|
|
Memory
|
Total Video Memory
|
1280 MB
|
1536 MB
|
|
Memory Interface
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320 bit
|
384 bit
|
|
Total Memory Bandwidth
|
133.9 GB/s
|
177.4 GB/s
|
|
Fillrate
|
Texture Fill Rate(Bilinear)
|
34 GigaTexels/sec
|
42.0 GigaTexels/sec
|
|
Physical & Thermal
|
Fabrication Process
|
40nm
|
40nm
|
|
Connectors
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2x Dual Link DVI-I, Mini HDMI
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2x Dual Link DVI-I, Mini HDMI
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|
Form Factor
|
Dual Slot
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Dual Slot
|
|
Power Connectors
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2x6 Pin
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1x6 Pin, 1x8 Pin
|
|
Max Board Power (TDP)
|
215 watts
|
250 watts
|
|
Recommended Power Supply
|
550 watts
|
600 watts
|
|
GPU Thermal Threshold
|
105°C
|
105°C
|
Enjoy gaming experience like never before with the extreme gaming PCs available at Evetech based on the latest Nividia GeForce GTX 480 Graphics Card. See the future of gaming for yourself with NVIDIA GeForce GTX400 Series DX11 Gaming PC’s – you will not be happy with anything less.
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