Nvidia GeForce GTX 470 preview review

• 
• 
• 
• 

 1 of 4

Gallery

Posted on 26 Mar 2010 at 23:01

With its Radeon HD 5000-series graphics cards released months ago, ATI would seem to have the graphics card market sewn up. Nvidia hasn't been sitting idle though, and has been working on its own DirectX 11 card, code-named Fermi.

We've got a preview of the first card to use this new graphics processor, the GeForce GTX 470. This card should sell for around £300, meaning it should compete with ATI's high-end Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5850 graphics cards.

DirectX 11

As you'd expect from a modern graphics card, the GTX 470 is DirectX 11-compliant. This evolution of DirectX 10 introduces some big improvements. The main ones are tessellation, DirectCompute and multithreaded rendering.

Tessellation allows the complexity of an object to increase as the player moves towards it. It means that less computing power is required for objects in the distance, but boosts the realism of a game by making objects closer to the camera more detailed.

The way tessellation works means that it's easier for programmers to deal with and the transition to more complicated objects should be smoother than the old way, where programmers had to create several different models each with a different level of complexity, often resulting in 'pop up' as an object's level of detail changed.

DirectCompute is designed to allow the GPU to be used for other jobs, such as video encoding. GPU's are highly efficient at dealing with parallel computing tasks, and can massively reduce computation times in certain cases. It's something that Nvidia has been pushing with its CUDA architecture, and the GTX 470 is being pushed as a potential card for use in servers.

Finally, multithreaded rendering means that multi-core processors can be used to the full by queuing up work for the graphics card ahead of time, avoiding the limitation of traditional games where only a single processor core could be used. This should help boost efficiency, but you're unlikely to see that transferred into real frame rate improvements in games, as developers will use the improved efficiency to introduce new special effects.