Originally posted by sammorris:

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Omega: You have to bear in mind that everything Fermi stands for furthers the performance of GPU computing applications, and not gaming performance. While the GTX480 will be a powerful card in itself, the optimisations of the new technology go toward better CUDA performance, not higher frame rates in games.

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Originally posted by Guru3D:

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As such the GTX 295 pushes 42 FPS at 2560x1600 with 4xAA (on average), but the Radeon HD 5970 brutally sodomizes the GTX 295 here with nearly doubled up performance.

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Originally posted by Semiaccurate:

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On the GTX470 side, there are 448 shaders, and the clocks are set at 625MHz and 1250MHz in both cases. If the GTX480 is really at 600Mhz and 1200MHz, and the GTX470 is slightly faster, it should really make you wonder about the thermals of the chip. Remember when we said that the GF100 GTX480 chip was having problems with transistors at minimal voltages? Basically Nvidia has to crank the voltages beyond what it wanted to keep borderline transistors from flaking out. The problem is that this creates heat, and a lot of it. Both of our sources said that their cards were smoking hot. One said they measured it at 70C at idle on the 2D clock.

The fans were reported to be running at 70 percent of maximum when idling, a number that is far, far too high for normal use. Lets hope that this is just a BIOS tweaking issue, and the fans don't need to be run that fast. It would mean GF100 basically can't downvolt at all on idle. On the upside, if it's any comfort, the noise from the fans at that speed was said to be noticeable, but not annoying.

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Quote:

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Now that you know the raw clocks, how does it perform? It is a mixed bag, but basically the cards are much below Nvidia's original expectations publicly stated as 60 percent faster than Cypress. The numbers that SemiAccurate were told span a variety of current games, all running at very high resolutions. Here is where we can't list specifics or the Nvidia Keystone Kops might find their first SemiAccurate mole. We will bring you the full spreadsheets when the cards are more widespread.

The GTX480 with 512 shaders running at full speed, 600Mhz or 625MHz depending on which source, ran on average 5 percent faster than a Cypress HD5870, plus or minus a little bit. The sources were not allowed to test the GTX470, which is likely an admission that it will be slower than the Cypress HD5870.

There is one bright spot, and it is a very bright spot indeed. No, not the thermal cap of the chip, but the tessellation performance in Heaven. On that synthetic benchmark, the numbers were more than twice as fast as the Cypress HD5870, and will likely beat a dual chip Hemlock HD5970. The sources said that this lead was most definitely not reflected in any game or test they ran, it was only in tessellation limited situations where the shaders don't need to be used for 'real work'.

Update: The games tested DID include DX11 games, and those are still in the 5% range. Heaven uses tessellation in a way that games can not, Heaven can utilize far more shaders for tessellation than a normal game can, they have to use them for, well, the game itself. The performance of Heaven on GTX480 was not reflected in any games tested by our sources, DX9, 10, 10.1 or 11.

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