GTX 480M SLI
Foreword
GTX 480M SLI It won’t be audacious to say that this Video-card is the best of the best. “The ultimate choice for laptops;” That’s how reviewers say about this graphic card. “The Card Which Will Blow Your Mind No-Mater what Game you will play.” “It Would Be Reasonable To Call It Fastest Notebook GPU.”
The GeForce GTX480M SLI supports the same features as a single GTX 480M card. A single card is based on the Fermi architecture. Therefore, it supports DirectX 11 and is produced in 40nm at TSMC. Featuring 352 cores, the GTX480M is similar to the desktop GTX 465 but features a lower clock rate. The GeForce GTX 480M is combined with 2 GB of fast GDDR5 graphics memory (dedicated) and the performance should beat the Mobility Radeon HD 5870.
Performance
The performance of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 480M SLI is due to the good driver support for SLI clearly better than two ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 in Crossfire Mode (CF). This means the GTX 480M SLI is the fastest graphics solution for laptops at the time of arrival (2010-06). It allows the user to play all current games in high resolutions and detail settings with Antialiasing activated. Only Metro 2033 and Crysis have to be run in lower settings (see below). Still in some (very new or old) games the performance gain of SLI may be very small or sometimes a single card may be even a bit faster (due to no SLI support and overhead). You can still disable SLI in the drivers in that case. In our gaming tests a single 480M was about 16% (Starcraft 2) to 48% (Far Cry 2) slower than the SLI combination. Most of the games ran about 40% slower on the single card (see expandable gaming charts below). Due to the fast tessellation unit, upcoming DirectX 11 games may have an advantage over the current AMD 5000 series.
The rendering cores of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 480M can be used for general calculations using CUDA or DirectCompute. Eg the encoding for HD videos can be done significantly faster using the shader cores of the GPUs compared to modern CPUs. PhysX is also supported by the mobile Fermi to calculate physics effects in supported games. Furthermore, a single GTX480M can be used to calculate PhysX while the other card renders the game.
Game Benchmarks
CoD-Black Ops (2010)
low: 137.9 fps
med.:105.6fps
high: 70.2 fps
ultra: 51.1 fps
Medal Of Honor (2010)
low: 150.0 fps
med.:128.7 fps
high: 88.0 fps
ultra: 60.3 fps
Mafia 2 (2010)
low: 124.7 fps
med.:113.2 fps
high: 105.8 fps
ultra: 75.8 fps
StarCraft 2 (2010)
low: 279.6 fps
med.:74.9 fps
high: 64.6 fps
ultra: 42.5 fps
Metro 2033 (2010)
low: 134.4 fps
med.:106.8 fps
high: 61.1 fps
ultra: 23.1 fps
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (2010)
low: 151.6 fps
med.:134.4 fps
high: 110.6 fps
ultra: 64.7 fps
CoD Modern Warfare 2 (2009)
low: 277.5 fps
med.:148 fps
high: 129.1 fps
ultra: 90.3 fps
Risen (2009)
low: 148.9 fps
med.:125.7 fps
high: 104.6 fps
ultra: 70.9 fps
Resident Evil 5 (2009)
low: 157.8 fps
high: 98.7 fps
ultra: 97.5 fps
Need for Speed Shift (2009)
med.:113.8 fps
high: 115.9 fps
ultra: 93 fps
Colin McRae: DIRT 2 (2009)
low: 188.2 fps
med.:157.5 fps
high: 130.7 fps
ultra: 81.3 fps
Anno 1404 (2009)
low: 173 fps
ultra: 103.9 fps
Sims 3 (2009)
high: 120+ fps
med.:145+ fps
low: 312+ fps
FEAR 2 (2009)
low: 238.3 fps
med.:160.2 fps
high: 154.7 fps
ultra: 108.7 fps
GTA IV – Grand Theft Auto (2008)
high: 49+ fps
med.:45+ fps
low: 56+ fps
Left 4 Dead (2008)
low: 244.2 fps
high: 191.1 fps
Far Cry 2 (2008)
low: 199.7 fps
high: 134 fps
ultra: 88.1 fps
Crysis Warhead (2008)
ultra: 35+ fps
low: 73+ fps
Call of Duty 4 – Modern Warfare (2007)
low: 357.4 fps
med.:244 fps
high: 172.1 fps
Crysis – (2007)
low: 170.3 fps
med.:89.5 fps
high: 72.8 fps
ultra: 30.1 fps
World in Conflict – (2007)
ultra: 35+ fps
high: 47+ fps
med.:74+ fps
low: 165+ fps
Call of Juarez Benchmark (2006)
high: 152.2 fps
Half Life 2 – Lost Coast Benchmark (2005)
high: 244.9 fps
FEAR (2005)
high: 139+ fps
med.:208+ fps
low: 352+ fps