As with any new architecture, there are still obviously areas for improvement and in the case of the GTX 480 there was a straw that almost broke the camel’s back. Our comparative testing charts were extremely eye-opening since they showed exactly what they were meant to: issues with resolution scaling. In Left 4 Dead 2, Aliens versus Predator, BattleField: Bad Company 2 and Unigine Heaven, we saw what looked to be an insurmountable lead at lower resolutions all but vanish at 2560 x 1600. Thankfully for NVIDIA, the GTX 480 was able to pull its butt out of the fire with strong AA performance. Nonetheless, this is particularly worrying since high resolution gaming is what the GTX 480 was supposedly built for and if it can’t maintain a sizable lead over the HD 5870 in exactly this area, many enthusiasts may question its price premium.
We can’t state for a fact whether some of the performance drop-offs we saw at 2560x1600 were due to an architectural issue or immature drivers but it seems everyone we talked to (from fellow editors to NVIDIA themselves) had their own explanations. For now, we’ll keep an open mind and side with NVIDIA’s explanation which stated there are certain driver optimizations which have yet to be implemented.
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