Digital Home Thoughts: Nvidia's $500 Graphics Behemoth: The GTX 480 and GTX 470 Demoed at PAX East 2010

"Let's get the hard data out of the way first: 480 CUDA cores, 700 MHz graphics and 1,401MHz processor clock speeds, plus 1.5GB of onboard GDDR5 memory running at 1,848MHz (for a 3.7GHz effective data rate). Those are the specs upon which Fermi is built, and those are the numbers that will seek to justify a $499 price tag and a spectacular 250W TDP. We attended a presentation by NVIDIA this afternoon, where the above GTX 480 and its lite version, the GTX 470, were detailed. The latter card will come with a humbler 1.2GB of memory plus 607MHz, 1,215MHz and 1,674MHz clocks, while dinging your wallet for $349 and straining your case's cooling with 215W of hotness."

Like the Engadget guys, I was in the audience for this presentation and I can tell you first-hand the card has some serious firepower. It's almost enough to excuse the forehead smack-inducing "Crank that S#!t Up" tagline—almost. Nvidia's Drew Henry showed off the new card's ability to run games in 3D just about as smoothly as their 2D counterparts. And he showed them on 3 humungous screens in the main auditorium. Henry stated that the general direction of the entertainment industry was heading towards 3D as evidenced by the recent popularity of Avatar, and he said he wanted Nvidia to lead the PC graphics industry down this path. He also showed off the GTX 480's ability to do ray tracing in near-real time. I say near-real time, because the card couldn't always keep up with the gloss it was asked to render. In the included application, Design Garage, the user is given a number of cars to customize and explore in a variety of lighting conditions using ray tracing. But setting the bloom to full and the details to high or, ahem, cranking that s#!t up, produced amazing photo-realistic results after a short re-render.

They showed off titles from big-name game publishers with 3D turned on, all of which looked pretty incredible on the big screens. EA's Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was probably the best looking of the bunch, which included Need for Speed and its companion app Design Garage, THQ's upcoming Metro 2033, and even a surprise public appearance by World of Warcraft. Henry pitched that the chip, which has 3 billion transistors, rivals four Intel quad core i7 chips in transistors alone. In one of the cooler demos, Supersonic Sled, a test pilot on a rocket-strapped train sled barrels down a line of rickety old track, tearing up the scenery as it speeds along. Nvidia's Henry paused over a particularly interesting part, a bridge exploding under the sled's speed and weight, and instructed his technician to "crank that s#!t up" (are you getting the pattern?). Turning the number of particles on the bridge from 10,000 to an astounding 1,000,000 created a dazzling explosion that looked even better in 3D.

But, as Engadget points out, the card runs hot and it runs expensive. The GTX 480 will set you back $499 when it comes out in two weeks. Its "little brother," the GTX 470, is also out in two weeks and will retail for $349.