First Look: Nvidia GeForce GTX 480

27.03.2010

With the synthetics out of the way, we can get down to the real-world performance. All of our tests were performed at 1920-by-1200 and 2560-by-1600 resolutions, at the highest available settings, alternating between disabling and enabling anti-aliasing.

Tom Clancy's HAWX

There were no real surprises in our testing of Tom Clancy's HAWX, a DirectX 10.1-based combat flight simulator.This particular test models cities, which are summarily destroyed by dogfighting aircraft and attack helicopters. Lighting and shadow-mapping are important here, with large outdoor environments bathed in sunlight. While the GeForce GTX 480 is fastest here, it's sort of a moot point; only at 2560x1600 with anti-aliasing do any of the cards ever fall below an average of 60 frames per second.

Ubisoft's World in Conflict

Performance results for Ubisoft's World in Conflict were equally unsurprising. It's a DirectX 10-based real time strategy game, offering up plenty of detailed models and volatile explosions to challenge the GPUs. Nvidia's new high-end card typically runs this game around 16-20% faster than the less expensive Radeon HD 5870, except at lower resolutions without anti-aliasing applied. As with HAWX, only at 2560x1600 with AA do any of the cards really start to break a sweat.