NVIDIA GTX 480 benchmarks are in

We usually like to get our hands on test hardware to put it through its paces, but with no NVIDIA presence in SA, it’s unlikely that we get one of the new Fermi GPUs to play with.

With that in mind, we have resigned ourselves to republishing benchmarks published by one of our favourite international hardware news sites, Hexus.

NVIDIA released its own benchmarks a few weeks ago, and they indicated that its flagship Fermi card, the GTX 480, is a touch nippier than ATi’s HD 5870, making in the fastest single GPU card in the world. Of course, nobody took their claim seriously, and so they shouldn’t. However, now independently run benchmarks have emerged, and it seems that NVIDIA may not have been bluffing.

The following benchmarks were leaked by arabhardware.net, and republished at Hexus.

From the looks of these, the GTX 480 has a pretty significant edge on the HD 5870. Perhaps this should be expected, given that the HD 5870 was released half a year ago, and the GTX 480 is scheduled for international release this Friday.

It is obviously impossible for us to confirm the authenticity of these results; however, Arabhardware.net is a fairly large and respected website in its region.

If these performance findings are accurate, then NVIDIA can almost justify the steep pricing strategy.

The GTX 480 will sell for $499 (R3700) at launch, and the GTX 470 for $349 (R2580), and those are US prices before import duties, as well as the mystical South African price inflation phenomena taking its cut.

To put it in perspective, the HD 5870 sells for around $420 (R3060) in the US, and around R4150 in SA. This means that the GTX 480 will almost definitely be significantly more expensive in SA than the HD 5870 at launch.

Discuss GTX 480 benchmarks in the forums

Thanks again to Subversion.