The GeForce GTX 480 chip can't be manufactured in any real volume with the full 512 cores intact, meaning that it loses a stream-processing unit composed of 32 cores. Ramping up clocks on a 3bn-transistor GPU manufactured on a 40nm process is also difficult without running into fundamental thermal concerns, hence why GTX 480 isn't clocked especially high, and the card chews through watts with gay abandon.
Conjecturing somewhat, GeForce GTX 480 is probably 75 per cent of the high-end GPU that was imagined by NVIDIA early last year. Our numbers show that NVIDIA's finest single-GPU card is, on average, around 20 per cent faster than AMD's Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB at a 2,560x1,600 resolution. GeForce GTX 480 is due to cost some 40 per cent more, so whilst the trade-off between extra expense and performance isn't ideal, it's not shockingly bad, either.
How does it play out for the gamer right now? Radeon HD 5970 remains the world's fastest graphics card, GeForce GTX 480 becomes the world's fastest single-GPU card, and Radeon HD 5870 is still a good bet at sub-£300.
Bottom line: NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480 could have easily been better, perhaps should have been considering the time of arrival, but we feel that, underscored and handicapped by a paradigm shift in GPU thinking, it retains enough features and visceral ooh la la to be worthy of a £400 price-tag, if not £450.
