ZOTAC GTX480 Review
Tessellation and Unigine
Published: 15th April 2010 | Source: Zotac | Price: £441.76 |
Tessellation
The big technological leap that nVidia are advertising for this generation of cards is Tessellation, which is the ability to smooth out polygons without increasing the amount of them built by the 3D artist. This should lead to far greater performance scalability without sacrificing detail as can be seen from the shot below. Although the dragon greatly improves in quality the surrounding rocks remain the same.
Rather than have to hunt around the latest games in an attempt to find something that will demonstrate the usefulness of Tessellation in a non-benchmark environment, nVidia have kindly supplied a comparison screenshot of Metro 2033.
We've all had a good look, so if any of our readers can spot some jaw dropping difference we'd love to hear it, because we can't.
Unigine
Unigine is a very recent benchmarking suite that will test your DirectX 11 card to the limits. We're going to use it to test how well the ZOTAC GTX480s much vaunted Tessellation feature works in practise.
Firstly we will run with Tessellation set to normal with 0 and then 8xMSAA.
With anti-aliasing off the HD5870 can just about keep up with the stock GTX480 but once it is overclocked towards its expected speed the ZOTAC GTX480 really annihilates the Radeon.
Once anti-aliasing is ramped up to 8xMSAA the ability of the GTX480 to tesselate really comes into its own as it spanks the Radeon comprehensively.
Leaving the overclocked card aside for a moment, as it clearly has the upper hand, Tessellation was set to Extreme and the tests were run with the cards at their default speeds. Any doubts about how much of a benefit Tessellation could be are instantly demolished.
Let's hope that the game coders take full advantage of it.
And finally to see the how much raw power we have available with the ZOTAC, we ran with Tessellation disabled. The brute horsepower of the GTX480 still wins out.
Most Recent Comments
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Originally Posted by name='clone38'
Aye its a bit of a let down by NV this time as i was really looking forward to the new cards.
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I hope the next generation brings something better to the show, because these are too hot for what they give, and when a 5970 is only £50 more, they represent very poor value.
My 280ocx is dammed loud on air but having heard these I couldn't put up with the noise.
Coz i imagine if u would oc a nuclear-reactor u wouldnt think twice before u would oc the ATI cards
My 5970s overclock to 900MHz core very happily (haven't really pushed them much) so I reckon the 480s would have to fight pretty hard to keep up. Also, can you imagine SLI 480s overclocked...I mean hell would look like a fridge comparatively.
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Originally Posted by name='Diablo'
Also, can you imagine SLI 480s overclocked....
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*removed*
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Originally Posted by name='ppuff'
Judging by the color of the cooler it seems that NVIDIA can use it to light their own victory cigar.
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i will stick to my 5870 and rather buy me a second one than one of the 480th.
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Originally Posted by name='Diablo'
I mean hell would look like a fridge comparatively.
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The Fermis apparently scale OK, but not as well as the 5870s. The fermi's are fast, but I'd be a little bit worried aout sticking them in a case with my other kit. I mean its fine for them to run hot apparently, but my processor and RAID controller are a little bit less happy with 90C+
Correctly installed/setup, the 480 with a voltage tweak and running at 850+ on stock cooling is breaking into 90 degrees
5870 in xfire is outstanding btw.
No matter how good the nvidia cards are, I would still worry about sticking that runs so hot into my case, where all the other components will get hot. Same applies with watercooling unless you have a couple of triple or quads to cool the cards.
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