Throwback Thursday – Geforce GTX 480 with roasting “Fermi” turns one

Since the launch of the Kepler architecture in 2012, it has been a well-established truth that Nvidia makes energy-efficient graphics cards, something that has not always been true. For many years, AMD hit hard from below with its energy-efficient graphics cards, which did not always perform at the top but compensated with powerful prices.

When TSMC launched its 40-nanometer technology, it became an unusually difficult story. On the one hand, the manufacturer himself had a hard time getting well yield, the number of working circuits in production, but it also proved to be a challenge for players such as AMD and Nvidia to design for.

Something that is said to have saved AMD was the company’s pipe cleaner Radeon HD 4770, which became the first graphics circuit at 40 nanometers. The graphics card was part of the middle segment for the HD 4000 series, which until then had been manufactured at 55 nanometers and made AMD learn to master the technology before the launch of the HD 5000 series.

Nvidia’s response to the Radeon HD 5000 series would be the Geforce GTX 400 series with the new Fermi architecture. Prior to the launch, Nvidia talked about the upcoming flagship Geforce GTX 480, but difficulties in getting some working circuits in large volumes caused the launch to be delayed by six months.

In the end, Nvidia managed to get something that worked and could be sold, but it was far from what the company was hoping for. Even in the top model Geforce GTX 480, the GF100 graphics circuit was sold in a scaled-down version with a SM cluster disabled, the voltage was high, the clock frequencies were low and the company’s first memory controls with support for GDDR5 did not impress either. Rumors that Nvidia continued to be drawn with bad yields did not want to give in either.

Of a total of 512 CUDA cores in the GF100 graphics circuit, the Geforce GTX 480 was launched with 480 active ones with a GPU frequency of 700 MHz. The goal from Nvidia’s side was for a full-scale circuit with a GPU frequency of at least 750 MHz, which would have given around 15 percent higher performance.

The memory controllers of the circuit, on the other hand, remained full-scale with a width of 384 bits and this was paired with 1.5 GB of GDDR5 type graphics memory. At its lowest, the GDDR5 circuit was sold with a specified effective clock frequency of 4,000 MHz, but with the GF100, Nvidia had to stay at 3,696 MHz from the factory. The result was a bandwidth of 177.4 GB / s instead of 192 GB / s according to the actual lowest frequency for GDDR5.

The performance sacrifices were flanked by sky-high power consumption, where the graphics card with a TDP value of 250 W was the thirsty graphics card with a single graphics circuit seen so far. Not only this, Nvidia left an open goal with the radiator, where heat pipes and heat sinks lay against a visible “grill”. Overall, this architecture gave it the nickname Thermi. There were also those who for fun tried to fry eggs and bacon on its “grill”.

► Read SweClocker’s test of Nvidia Geforce GTX 480 (2010-03-27)

Even if the first generation Fermi did not reach all the way or reach what Nvidia had hoped for, it was enough to overtake AMD’s flagship Radeon HD 5870. The price for this was 135 W higher power consumption in SweClocker’s test lab and of course also, yes, the actual price. AMD also had the Radeon HD 5970, in practice dual HD 5870, which kept the lead at the top.

Nvidia was not on the side of laziness but was in full swing with the second generation Fermi, which was not really something new and can most easily be described as “Fermi done right”. The refined circuit GF110 and Geforce GTX 580 came with all 512 CUDA cores activated, the GDDR5 memory ran at an efficient 4,000 MHz and the power consumption was marginally lower. But that’s a different story.

This is how the Geforce GTX 480 performs in 2019

The Geforce GTX 480 may be a nine-year-old graphics card, but we can not end this article without seeing how the old faithful servant stands in today’s game. As usual, we select the three titles Battlefield 1, Destiny 2 and Rise of the Tomb Raider, where these run with the same settings and hardware as SweClocker’s usual test suite for graphics cards.

Nvidia’s driver support for the Geforce GTX 480 ended in early 2018 and therefore the tests are run with the latest version that supported the graphics card – Geforce Drivers 391.35. In terms of resolution, we limit ourselves to 1,920 × 1,080 pixels, as higher levels feel unreasonable on this old graphics hardware.

It hardly comes as a surprise that Nvidia’s flagship from 2010 will find it difficult to drive around Battlefield 1 with the detail control on the roof. The Geforce GTX 480 lands a bit below the 30 FPS line and is defeated by its successor Geforce GTX 580 with a 15 percent higher frame rate.

A similar scenario is painted in Destiny 2, where high settings are simply not a sustainable alternative for the Geforce GTX 480. The model again lands just below the average frame rate of 30 frames per second and lags behind its predecessor Geforce GTX 580.

The last stop at Rise of the Tomb Raider and we meet what can be compared to a slide show. The Geforce GTX 480 handles itself with an average of 16 FPS and shouts after us to turn down the detail settings.

Geforce GTX 480 with different quality levels

Although high detail settings are not an option for the Geforce GTX 480, it may be interesting to see if the card can present a playable frame rate with less eye candy. We therefore run through the three game titles once more at all preset detail modes that are available.

It quickly becomes clear that you need to sacrifice quite a lot of eye candy to get up the frame rate with the Geforce GTX 480. With the slider turned down at the bottom, we manage to achieve an average frame rate of 60 FPS in Battlefield 1 while the remaining titles fall somewhat short on this.

Summary thoughts on the Geforce GTX 480 nine years later

At launch, the Geforce GTX 480 gave us mixed impressions. It was admittedly the world’s fastest graphics card with a single graphics circuit, but at the same time came with both a juicy price tag to say the least and a sky-high power output. In the name of honesty, the card felt more like a foretaste of “real” Fermi that would be released six months later in the form of the Geforce GTX 580.

In terms of the model’s performance potential in 2019, it is still possible to play the latest track’s titles if the detail control is really thumbs up and you can live with a frame rate generally below the 60 FPS line. If you have higher demands than that, however, it is high time to start looking at a fresh graphics card with a more modern architecture.

Were you one of those people who bought a Geforce GTX 480? Share your experiences in the comment thread of this article!