General Discussions

I was doing some reading on the GTX480 in SLI and Tri-SLI setups and they made a point of noting how well they scaled performance.

It was something along the lines of going from one card to two increased power by 100% and going from two to three increased power by about 40%.

First, is this true and second, how do other leading cards compare in scaling?

Again you have to realise different companies offer different boards. So you cant say all will have power issues. And the cards that were previewed are not the final product that will be launched.

Im sure it will all be ironed out, or make sure you stick to a specific manufacturer, for instance XFX or Gigabyte, both of which I feel offer the most reliable and more energy efficient cards.

I'm not talking about electricity consumption, I'm talking performance.

XFX makes very solid cards i can testify to that. no issues whatsoever. i think i'll wait for about a month or a month and a half before i get the GF480 even though my 295's r running beautifully. one thing about the 480 that really bothers me is that it has a voracious appetite for power. i think its about 650W plus under full 3D load each.

I think the Fermi Architecture helped with the 4xx's performances. But still many doubts its powers. Many, yeah MANY, still says the 5970 still beats the 4xx's performances. But you know how it goes, ATi will make another card that will beat the 470 and the 480, but NVidia is on their way on making the 495, a dual gpu card.

You should have said performance instead of power >.<

Yeah it scales well when SLI'ing, its close to 100% per card.

Back to general talking now


ATI fans can say what they wish, but the 4xx GPU's can handle more in terms of texels, pixels etc which would bottleneck the 5970.

ATI have more threads (aka Streams) running at once than Nvidia cards, but Nvidia cards have better hardware that dont need threads as much to do certain things. For instance, CUDA effects, Physx effects and so on.

Eventually games will start using more and more Physx hardware usage, and thats when ATI will lose out.

[Edited by DABhand, 4/5/2010 10:37:40 AM]

XFX also has the best warranty of all manufacturers.

I ruined an XFX GeForce 7950 card installing an aftermarket cooler and they refunded me the retail price--even though I got it on sale and had a rebate, AND ruined it myself.

Thanks!