Now that the dust has settled on PAX East, Nvidia is rolling out its new flagship graphics processors. The first products in its highly anticipated Fermi line, Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470 target hard-core gamers who demand potent tessellation performance.
Tessellation is what allows game developers to leverage the GeForce GTX 480 GPU to increase the geometric complexity of models and characters. The new GPUs also offer PC-gaming features like support for real-time ray tracing and 3D Vision Surround for a widescreen 3-D gaming experience. Translated, all this means more realistic and visually appealing games.
Although early reviews demonstrate that the new GPUs are up to 10 to 15 percent faster than the comparative ATI Radeon card, Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, said there are also reports that the cards run hot and consume plenty of energy. That might not be a good combination in an office cubicle.
“Frankly, generating heat and consuming energy aren’t typically big issues if we are talking about computer gamers, but in scenarios where these cards are being used for industrial settings or to improve performance in work environments, power efficiency and heat creation are issues that some companies take very seriously,” King said. “You don’t want to have to turn the air conditioning in a graphics department down to 50 just because everybody’s legs are staying toasty.”
Microsoft Welcomes Fermi
While the jury may be out on corporate use of the Fermi GPUs, Microsoft’s gaming division has been eagerly anticipating the new cards because the company believes they pave the way to better PC gaming.
Mike Angiulo, general manager of Windows planning and the PC ecosystem at Microsoft, said DirectX 11 for Windows 7 was designed with native support for GPGPU, tessellation and improved multi-threading.
“Nvidia clearly embraced this and designed the GTX 480…