The fault lies with the video memory: Nvidia's card is bundled with 1.5GB of video memory, while our 5870s are limited to 1GB. When pressed, the GTX 480 didn't post playable frame rates, but managed to complete the benchmark. At the 1920-by-1200 resolution under Extreme tessellation at 16x anti-aliasing, we saw an average of 25 frames per second. With the same test at a 2560-by-1600 resolution, we saw 17.3 frames per second. Neither one makes a very good gaming experience, but it does show quite a bit of potential for tessellation, later on.

For our final synthetic test, we used FurMark -- an open-sourced, OpenGL benchmarking tool. It's tests are based on fur-rendering algorithms to test, and place rather extreme levels of pressure on a GPU in the process. Our tests were conducted at a resolution of 1920-by-1200 pixels, at 0x-, 4x-, and 8x-multi-sampled anti-aliasing. As our handy chart shows, the GTX 480 lead the pack, followed by the overclocked 5870.

Keep in mind however that synthetic benchmarks are not the greatest measure of actual performance -- and this disclaimer goes doubly so for FurMark. You'd be hard pressed to find an application that will stress a graphics card as exhaustively as FurMark does -- and there have been instances .

Where FurMark does excel, however, is in giving us a good idea of what these cards would look like when operating at their upper limits. During a minute-long FurMark run we saw the GTX 480 get as hot as 95 degrees Celsius -- that's 203 degrees Fahrenheit. Our stock HD 5870 peaked at 75 degrees Celsius (167 degrees Fahrenheit), while the overclocked R5870 Lightning reached 78 degrees Celsius (172 degrees Fahrenheit).

Games Performance