Some of the hard specs on Nvidia’s completely next-gen Fermi graphics cards have been out there, but this is what you can actually buy around April 12: The $US500 GeForce GTX 480 and $US350 GeForce GTX 470.
Nvidia’s calling the GTX 480 the “fastest video card in the world” with 480 processing cores (ha) and 1.5GB of video RAM. It eats up 250W of power, so stringing together two or three via SLI would require a small power plant in your PC. Slightly less ridiculous is the GTX 470, with 448 cores, 1.28GB of RAM and pulling 215W, for $US350. Nvidia’s benchmarks obviously show it crushing ATI’s top-of-the-line 5000 series cards. We’ll leave the hardcore benchmarking to our nerdier friends out there.
Nvidia’s promising “tens of thousands” of the cards will be available at launch, and you should start seeing them sometime around April 12, though you might find ‘em earlier. [Nvidia]
bob
Monday, March 29, 2010 at 8:01 AMwhere’s the hd 5970?
Zach Raftery
Monday, March 29, 2010 at 8:24 AMActually benchmarking tests have found it either worse or on par with the HD5970 – a long way off “crushing”. However the HD5970 is a dual-GPU card, so I guess if you reported that it crushed ATI’s single GPU 5000 series cards, this would have been more accurate.
aberkae
Monday, March 29, 2010 at 8:36 AM5970 is fastest video card in the world and uses less power and runs cooler according to all reviews out:
Anon
Monday, March 29, 2010 at 12:53 PMThe 5970 is the fastest GENERIC gpu in the world, but the reason they do not compare it to the gtx 480 is because the 5970 is a dual gpu card. The 480 is a single gpu card. So the 480 is the fastest SINGLE gpu card in the world. They should reallu make that more clear.
Kin Enriquez
Monday, March 29, 2010 at 5:40 PMhaving a performance almost equal to a six-month old card while using more power and dissipating more heat is hardly “crushing” the competition.
the 480 is waaaaay behind the 5970 in benchmarks.
Lin
Tuesday, March 30, 2010 at 10:42 AMAlso the most expensive single GPU in the world…$150 (50%) more for extra 8% performance… not a good deal at all
fracture
Tuesday, April 27, 2010 at 10:32 PMis my 285 old yet