Six months after the normally expected timeframe Nvidia has finally come out with video cards based on the GF100 architecture – and the reviews have followed. These cards, the GTX470 and the GTX480, are very important. The previous GTX200 series of video cards were not a success for Nvidia. They were fairly competitive on performance, but they were too expensive for Nvidia to produce.
The GTX470 and GTX480 are again competitive on performance. In fact, they’re astounding. The GTX 480 is the fastest single-GPU card available today, giving Nvidia back that crown. It is really incredible what a modern video card can do, and the GTX 470/480 again has raised the bar. These are cards which are virtually impossible to overwhelm. The only way to make these cards slow down is to play Crysis at maximum detail settings. And even then you might need to run an anti-virus in the background or something.
But while I want to see fast cards, I also want to see cards which have some future in LAN boxes, HTPCs, and etc. An often forgotten reason why the Radeon 5750 and 5770 are great cards is that they are smaller, more power efficient, and cooler than the previous generation Radeon 4850 and 4870 which the new cards – in terms of price – are replacing. You can totally take a Radeon 5750, put it into a tiny case with a great micro-ATX board, and create a gaming machine capable of playing modern games at high framerates without sounding like a Harrier jet. The GTX470 and 480 are hot and noisy and not suitable for a small computer.
What’s most troubling about the GTX470 and 480, however, is what this means for the market. Nvidia can certainly scale these parts down, but this design is obviously less efficient than what ATI has available. It is also larger. What this means is that Nvidia simply is not going to be able to compete with ATI in the low-end market with these parts. I want to see Nvidia release some better products in the sub-$200 dollar range, but I think they’re going to have a hard time scaling down the GTX470 and 480 to that level. That means ATI is going to have a field day with the budget stuff and that prices won’t be as low as they could be.
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