The GT300/Fermi Thread - Part 2!

[Solus Corvus]

But we already know its performance so there's no need to wait. We know Fermi does Tessellation well. The guy in the video even says it's what sets them apart from the competition. This is exactly what Charlie said. He also said the GTX480 is only 0-5% faster than the 5870. He's been right for months now, so I'm going by his word.

Like I said, there's no reason to buy this card unless you're a die-hard Nvidia fan or use GPGPU apps.

I'm not some knee-jerk Charlie hater like some of the people around here. I realize that he sometimes gets thing right and sometimes wrong. But I'm not just going to take his word on it. Doing so would be foolish, imo. We don't know about any of the test details of the numbers Charlie gave, even if they are right.

nVidia doesn't have to beat ATi with more than ~10-20% all over the line up to make a success out of Fermi. Don't forget that the 5870 with that hefting price tag (comperad to 5850), is only ~10-20% better than 5850.

If GTX 480 is ~10-20% better than 5870 then nVidia has a winner, for sure, even after 6 mounts. Unless ATi can release a new/refresh card to match/beat it at the launch time.

If it's only 10-20% faster then Nvidia is in trouble. That's well within reach of the 1Ghz 5870 cards that are being released and will probably be available in volume before Fermi is even released.

It's not like last gen where 4890 was released much later and still couldn't match a 285. Instead you'd have a situation where the top single GPU NV card is matched in performance by something that came out before it did. That would be much worse then last gen for NV.

And that's just talking partner OCed 5870s that we already know are coming out. ATI could start binning or do a respin and introduce even faster 5890s.

The problem is that it looks like it will be 20% better AT MOST.So depending on the game/benchmark/settings it will be like 0-20%.

In Unigine there appear to be sequences where the 480 is ~60% faster then a 5870. That is a very significant lead. But Unigine Heaven is a highly contrived scenario with lots of tessellation and not much shaders. Performance in more tess/shader balanced scenarios remains to be seen, not to mention realistic AA/AF settings.