The card is based on . The feature-list is considerable: over 3 billion transistors, double the processing units of its predecessors (though ATI and Nvidia count these differently), and a strong emphasis on geometric realism. Nvidia's is chocked full of information and demonstrations, and includes white papers detailing the strides they've made.

Priced at $500, the GeForce GTX 480 is squarely aimed at... no competing product. The obvious target would be the reigning graphics card champ, ATI's Radeon HD 5870 -- but that card can generally be found for about $400. The 5870's bigger brother would be the next logical step, but that's a dual-GPU card, and it typically falls into the $700 range.

As the GTX 480 is Nvidia's fastest single-card GPU, we opted to center our first look at the part around ATI's fastest single-card GPU, the Radeon HD 5870. To even the playing field a bit, we also took a look at MSI's R5870 Lightning -- a factory overclocked HD 5870 priced at $500.

High-end components deserve a high-end test bed: Ours is equipped with processor, a DX58SO motherboard, 6 GB of RAM, and a 1300W power supply. All tests were performed at 1920-by-1200 and 2560-by-1600 resolutions on a 30" display, and highest settings (unless otherwise noted).

Synthetic Benchmarks