nVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 Pro Reviews

If you want to crank up the resolution and details of the latest games on a big LCD, the GTX 480 offers hyper-fast performance without the added complexity of a dual-GPU card.

NVIDIA does bring several things to the table with their video card. This card supports Triple SLI but keep aware of the power requirements of 250W for a single card maximum on a machine. PhysX is a great feature for games as you can see the visual difference in performance with it on and the effects can be amazing., 3D Vision Surround are also features that the competition does not have, NVIDIA has finally released a competitive part to match ATI but the question is will they release a competitive part to the rest of ATI’s lineup in a short fashion as the mainstream and value segments are where the majority of video card sales made. We will have to wait and see. NVIDIA has finally stepped up to the plate and in doing so we give the GTX480 a Hot Product Award for the folks and friends of NVIDIA.

The fastest single-GPU card money can buy, but not the giant leap forwards some people were expecting.

Nvidia devotees will be able to sleep more easily now that the company has finally released a DX11 card—and a good one. The GTX 480 packs the kind of features you'd expect from a new top-end card, and offers enough that's new to justify its $499 price for people who haven't upgraded in a while.

If you can stand the power requirements of these cards, both the GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 turned out to be surprisingly good enthusiast options. If you want the fastest single-GPU graphics card then the GTX 480 is the best there is and if you want a reasonably priced enthusiast solution then the GTX 470 is a worthy pick as well.

NVIDIA has created performance competitive and price competitive graphics cards that fall slightly behind in terms of noise and power consumption / power efficiency. Some readers will find the power/heat/noise issues a real draw back but I think that most enthusiasts and consumers worried about gaming performance are much more interested in value for your dollar than anything else. Our SLI testing with the GTX 480 and GTX 470 proved that NVIDIA has spent some time with the hardware and driver to tweak for incredible multi-GPU scaling.

By all accounts the GeForce GTX 480 is not the beast we were hoping it would be. The GTX 480 is one of the hottest -- and noisiest -- graphics card available. The GeForce GTX 480 is fast but given the extra time Nvidia had to work on the card and tweak it to perfection, we would have at least expected to do without the heat/power compromises.

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480 could have easily been better, perhaps should have been considering the time of arrival, but we feel that, underscored and handicapped by a paradigm shift in GPU thinking, it retains enough features and visceral ooh la la to be worthy of a £350-£400 price-tag, if not £450.

The GeForce GTX 480 isn't a bad GPU by any means, but its pricing brings a compelling dual-card solution from AMD into play. The sweet etail listing of Radeon HD 5850 and thoroughly decent scaling in CrossFireX means that it becomes even more difficult to make an objective case for the GeForce GTX 480 as a gaming card and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Radeon HD 5970.

All things considered, the GeForce GTX 480 is best described as a supremely high-end premium graphics card for those who care for nothing other than getting the highest possible performance off a single GPU.

While we’re sure the company wishes it was shipping 512-shader cards instead of pared-down boards, it’s hitting high-enough clocks to make GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470 generally-faster than Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850. This is especially true when you turn on anti-aliasing, as the new GeForce cards take a much smaller hit than their competition.

The GTX 480 isn’t necessarily a resounding success but we consider it to be a good stepping stone towards some much needed competition in the DX11 marketplace. It’s a great performer in exactly the areas where it will be most utilized while being backed up by an extremely respectable price. But, it just doesn’t deliver the much-needed knock-out blow to ATI’s offerings.

Nvidia's first DirectX 11 video card has been a long time in coming and it's not quite worth the wait. Though it's the fastest card on the market by a hair, its performance gains don't entirely justify its price.