A little more news from NVIDIA today, but unlike the news post below, this isn’t negative.  NVIDIA is still waiting to release a next-generation card to compete with AMD’s 5000-series that has been available since late September and while we know that something is coming on March 26th, they are teasing consumers once again with some early performance numbers.

Before you get too excited, the benchmark that NVIDIA chose to show of is the Heaven demo; an impressive piece of software but one that is a benchmark only and will likely have no real overlap with game performance – much like 3DMark.  In the video below NVIDIA’s Tom Petersen walks us through some details on what tessellation is and how it can improve the user experience for PC gamers and then shows some comparative performance between the GTX 480 and AMD’s Radeon HD 5870. 



This is all good news for NVIDIA, no doubt about that.  But is anyone else tired of these types of marketing gimmicks to attempt to keep gamers interested while we wait and wait for something tangible to be released?  First we had the Fermi architecture unveiling at GTC, then the reveal of NVIDIA Surround and 3D Surround at CES, followed by the GF100 features discussed just after CES, we got a countdown timer that revealed a date of when the cards are going to be announced and now this video that shows us basically the same things on display at CES but with the tag line of “coming very very soon.” 

NVIDIA teases with GPU performance that doesn't really matter - Graphics Cards 2

We keep posting it (and maybe this is our fault) because I think there are still some readers interested enough to keep paying attention.  Personally though, it’s time for NVIDIA to deliver.
Tom Petersen Director of Technical Mkt at NVIDIA describes how the performance of GeForce GTX 480 compares to existing solution. We highlight the different aspects of the benchmark and how the new GeForce excels in tessellation. Tom also offers a quick peak at how 3DVision Surround is pushing PC gaming forward.