Introduction

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480 (codenamed Fermi) has been one of the hottest forum topics of the last months. There was drama from all sides, NVIDIA users speculating about the nearing end of ATI, ATI users comforting themselves in words like yield, heat and power. The public release of GeForce GTX 480 last month shed light on many things: yes Fermi is fast, yes it also needs a lot of juice which makes it hotter and noisier compared to AMD's offerings. When the cards were first announced there was no immediate availability, and shelf dates were expected to be mid-April. In the recent days we have seen the first merchants listing availability of the GeForce GTX 480, and shortly thereafter "out of stock". We were lucky enough to receive a GTX 480 production card from ZOTAC for an SLI review.



Both retail and press samples are mostly identical, the only exception being a little piece of foam on the back of the retail GTX 480 boards that helps keeping multiple cards apart in SLI configurations. Also there is a newer VGA BIOS that slightly changes the fan settings. According to NVIDIA the fan will ramp up more quickly when the card is cool (~70°C) so that the maximum temperature is reduced. In terms of performance nothing has changed, no changes in the the new 197.41 driver either.



In order to run a GeForce GTX 480 SLI setup you need a motherboard that supports SLI- most Intel based motherboards today support it. Depending on the number of cards you plan to run you also need the proper number of PCI-Express slots available with enough spacing between them. Most motherboards have no problems accommodating two cards. In order to run three or four GTX 480 cards you usually have to buy a motherboard specifically designed for such setups. Four cards? Yes, you read right. The GeForce GTX 480 is the first NVIDIA card to support actual 4-way configurations across all vendors.

In this review we will take a look at a dual-card GeForce GTX 480 setup which should provide enough power for all games at any resolution and detail level.

Test System

We flashed both cards to the production BIOS 70.00.1A.00.02, as recommended by NVIDIA.

• All video card results were obtained on this exact system with the exact same configuration.
• All games were set to their highest quality setting

Each benchmark was tested at the following settings and resolution:

• 1024 x 768, No Anti-aliasing. This is a standard resolution without demanding display settings.
• 1280 x 1024, 2x Anti-aliasing. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens today (17" - 19"). A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.
• 1680 x 1050, 4x Anti-aliasing. Most common widescreen resolution on larger displays (19" - 22"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
• 1920 x 1200, 4x Anti-aliasing. Typical widescreen resolution for large displays (22" - 26"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
• 2560 x 1600, 4x Anti-aliasing. Highest possible resolution for commonly available displays (30"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.

BattleForge

BattleForge, a card based RTS, is developed by the German EA Phenomic Studio. A few months after launch the game was transformed into a Play 4 Free branded game. That move and the fact that it was included as game bundle with a large number of ATI cards made it one of the more well known RTS games of 2009. You as a player assemble your deck before game to select the units that will be available. Your choice can be from forces of Fire, Frost, Nature and Shadow to complement each other.
The BattleForge engine has full support for DX 9, DX 10 and DX 10.1, we used the internal benchmark tool to acquire our results.

Call of Duty 4

Call of Duty 4 is a first-person shooter that is built on the award winning Call of Duty Series. It is the first version to play in modern times. In a near-future conflict between the United States, Europe and Russia you get to play as a United States Marine and a British SAS operative. The engine is Infinity Ward's own creation and has true dynamic lighting, depth of field, dynamic shadows and HDR. Even though the game plot is scripted you will find yourself in intense battles, often working together with computer controlled team mates.