Bad Company 2 (DX11)
This latest DX11 title offers immense scenery and game physics that push Fermi’s Tessellation support to the limit. It seriously taxes any video card at resolutions higher than 1080P especially using all the highest settings.
Recording the overall average from running three different recorded scenes, the GTX 470 and 480 both produce very playable frame rates. The GTX 480 again lead the pack by a few frames. It seems as though the GTX 480 rendered some scenes just a little slower which allowed the HD 5870 to catch up. This could be due to the video drivers or even the card throttling down due to high heat, come to think of it. Further nVidia driver updates may change the way we experience BC2 in the future.
Crysis Warhead (DX10)
Still the DX10 monster of the last decade, Crysis Warhead didn’t do much to prevent either of the Fermi GPUs from offering playable rates.
The GTX 480 just edges past the HD 5870 using high settings. If this were a DX11 game, the GTX 480 might have had a place to shine even if it only managed to score a much lower frame rate.
BioHazard 5 (DX10)
This benchmark is much simpler and represents a pretty good standard of what many of the current mainstream titles have to offer. If your current video card can handle the two previous benchmarks, chances are that your frame rates will be similarly playable.
Naturally, the two nVidia GTX 4xx series cards have no problems handling the demo even with all the features maxed out and enabled. The GTX 480 essentially scores right at 20 frames per second more than its sibling and bests the HD 5870 pretty easily, on average. HD 5870 does bump ahead though in one of the areas though. The GTX 295 seems to hang in there though against its newer brother and even bests it in a few areas on this DX10 benchmark.
Cinebench (OpenGL Testing)
One thing that nVidia’s GPUs have always done well with in the past has been performance in most OpenGL dependent programs. Here, we see that the Zotac GTX 480 still holds the top single GPU lead with the HD 5870 close behind. The GTX 470 doesn’t do too shabby as it beats out its predecessor by a good 2 frames.