NVIDIA Teases with Tessellation Performance on GTX 480

Late last week, NVIDIA posted a video to YouTube that showcases the company’s upcoming GeForce GTX 480 graphics card, based on its Fermi architecture. In the video, NVIDIA’s Tom Peterson explains the perks that the card has, and how it will compare to the “competition”, and of course, why you will want one. Tom emphasizes superb tessellation performance, while also explaining how it works, with the help of Unigine’s Heaven benchmark.

Also in the video, two things can be seen, both the performance, when compared to the Radeon HD 5870, and also the fact that the card will require both an 8-pin and 6-pin PCI-E power connector. That’s something I’m not quite sure has been revealed in the past, but it’s important to note in case you are planning an upgrade and don’t have a PSU with an 8-pin (it can be assumed that you could use an adapter, though).

For performance data, NVIDIA provided just one line graph, measured with the Unigine benchmark. As expected, NVIDIA’s GPU performs well in certain portions of the benchmark, while it evens out in others, namely where tessellation isn’t used quite so much. To be honest, these results don’t instill too much faith in me, because aside from the tessellation-heavy portions of the benchmark, it looks as though the GTX 480 performs almost identically with the Radeon HD 5870. You can see just what I mean at the 2:55 mark.

If that’s the kind of performance we’re going to see from the GTX 480, then it leaves a lot to the imagination as to the potential success it will have. After all, if the card doesn’t manage to blow away the Radeon HD 5870, which was released about six months ago, then it’s going to be awful hard to get excited over. As we mentioned in our in-depth look at the Fermi architecture, it’s clear that things like tessellation and DirectX 11 in general will show great performance, but I truly hope NVIDIA is going to be able to beat ATI in other areas as well.

Then there’s the price, which hasn’t even come into the discussion. No one knows what it’s going to be, but rumor has it that the GTX 480 is going to be at least $200 more than the Radeon HD 5870. If that’s true, NVIDIA looks to have one heck of a rough sell. Given the card is set to launch in about three weeks, it’s only a matter of time before we find out.