Somehow Charlie has managed to get his hands on information on the new nVIDIA graphics cards that will be coming out … sometime.  You can see what he found out in full at SemiAccurate, but the short answer is that in supervised testing the GTX480 is about 5% faster than the HD5870 when it comes to performance; the GTX470  was not allowed to be tested, even under supervision.  The numbers stand at 512 shaders, with clocks @ 600MHz – 625MHz when in energy saving mode and 1200MHz – 1250MHz going at full speed.  The original GPGPU design and the extra math processing power just is not cutting it as a GPU alone.

[H]ard|OCP did spot a way for you to pre-order the card, if you want to pay $679 for $409 worth of performance.


"Now that you know the raw clocks, how does it perform? It is a mixed bag, but basically the cards are much below Nvidia’s original expectations publicly stated as 60 percent faster than Cypress. The numbers that SemiAccurate were told span a variety of current games, all running at very high resolutions. Here is where we can’t list specifics or the Nvidia Keystone Kops might find their first SemiAccurate mole. We will bring you the full spreadsheets when the cards are more widespread."

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