Nvidia GTX 400 Series Impressions

Sitting in the Main Theatre at PAX East on Friday, I knew something important was coming to the gaming world. I was at the very cusp of Nvidia’s official launch of their Fermi platform, which consists of their flagship card, the GTX480, and its little brother, the GTX 470. Needless to say, it was a great day for video games.

The expansive theater was filled to the brim with PAX-goers excited about the event. The fact soon dawned on me: these folks weren’t ordinary gamers anticipating any ordinary release. The hundreds of people in attendance all came to see a graphics card, a piece of hardware alone, launch; they can be none other than PC gamers, the very finest stock of enthusiasts. The launch of the card and the impressive PC gamer turnout are why Gordon Van Dyke, an EA guest speaker later on in the panel, says he laughs whenever hears the claim that “PC Gaming is dead.” On the contrary, the launch of the GTX 480 marks not just a great day, but the fantastic rest of PC gaming’s long life yet to come.

Drew Henry, General Manager of the Geforce team at Nvidia, hosted the launch and led the charge in the name of PC gaming. He held up Nvidia’s next generation, the GTX 480 card that will assuredly lie at the heart of PCs as it pumps out the life blood that is frames per second. Even though there was no motherboard, no CPU, no case, and no actual PC attached to the card that rested in Drew’s hand, I could tell right away that the GTX 480 fit Nvidia’s long-standing graphics philosophy: that of bigger, better, and more power. With its massive PCB, four large heat pipes, and nearly brick-sized dual-slot heatsink and fan, the GTX 480 considerably dwarfed the man’s puny hands.

1 million particles, in full PhysX and 3D, is a sight to behold.

Nvidia’s take on the graphics card isn’t one I’m personally comfortable with, as I prefer GPUs that still perform amazingly well despite their focus on power efficiency. Nevertheless, I respect Nvidia’s perspective behind their powerful behemoth cards: as Henry said, the company wants gamers to “Crank that shit up.” The GTX 400 series grants gamers that power.

The GTX 480 is, in Henry’s words, after all “The top-of-the-line, hands-down, fastest GPU we’ve ever built, the best GPU we’ve ever built, and, as well, the fastest GPU on the planet.” The GTX 470, meanwhile, maintains fantastic gaming performance despite its lower price tag. The specs Henry outlined back up his claims: the 480 has a daunting 3 billion transistors, 480 GPU cores, and a 1.5 GB frame buffer while the 470 has 448 cores and a 1.2 GB frame buffer. The performance charts he showed back up claims as well: compared to the last generation’s 285, the 480 offers a range of 1.5 to 2 times the frames-per-second performance across the board of the games shown (Crysis Warhead, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Hawx, Just Cause 2, Left 4 Dead, Need for Speed: Shift, Metro 2033, and Battlefield: Bad Company 2).

While fancy numbers and colorful performance charts are nice, the real-time game demos made the biggest impression. Starting with a demo of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Henry and EA’s Van Dyke demonstrated the 3D capabilities of the 480. Gaming in 3D, however, isn’t anything new, and Nvidia has supported their 3D Vision feature for quite some time already. “You know what?” said Henry, “I don’t think that quite looks good enough. I think we got to crank that shit up!” At that moment, the display turned on 3D Vision Surround, displaying an immersive, ridiculously wide, high-resolution 3D gameplay without any noticeable slowdowns. At the time, the 3D did look somewhat cool, but for whatever reason—my horrible viewing angle or the cheap, Avatar-style polarized 3D glasses—I also saw a considerable amount of image doubling.

Raytracing makes the most photorealistic cars in gaming ever.

Although the 3D also didn’t work well in any of the other demos, namely World of Warcraft, Need for Speed: Shift, Metro 2033, and Nvidia’s special Super Sonic Sled showcase, I did get the full 3D effect during my hands-on time with GTX 480-powered games on the PAX show floor. Utilizing the more expensive shutter 3D glasses, the 3D in the show floor demos looked pristine and perfect, and the 3D Vision Surround demos looked even more captivating. None of the games made use of any foreground depth, or “pop-out” of the screen, yet the realistic 3D depth looked incredible nonetheless.

I especially liked the Super Sonic Sled demo, where a man strapped to a giant rocket boosts along a rail track. Even though it technically isn’t a real game, it shows the potential capability of the GTX 480: the demo has the card run 3D, DirectX 11 with tessellation, and PhysX all at the same time. I “cranked that shit up” and dialed the particles on the track’s bridge to an extraordinary 1 million particles. As soon as the rocket blew across and destroyed the bridge, I paused the game, zoomed and panned around the bridge in mid-collapse, and marveled at the sight of 1 million particles rendered in full 3D.

The Need for Speed: Shift demo looked just as impressive. Specially modified for the GTX 400 series, the demo showcased, for the first time ever, full, interactive raytracing. While the lack of in-motion racing gameplay is an important note here, I could still pan the camera around the cars and witness how the raytracing dynamically renders highly accurate reflections of the surroundings on the cars’ shiny bodies.

If the ability to run 3D, DX 11, PhysX, and even the potential for raytracing all at great performance and high resolutions appeals to you, the GTX 400 series cards will serve you well. Furthermore, both the Super Sonic Sled and the Need for Speed: Shift raytracing demo will come free with every GTX 480 and 470, and will allow you play with the card’s new features right away. While Friday, March 26th was the “official” release for the 400 series, the cards won’t hit retail for another 14 days.