We've learned a lot about the GF100 architecture from NVIDIA over the past year, and after what seemed like an eternal wait, the company has officially announced the first two cards as part of these series, the GeForce GTX 470 and GeForce GTX 480 versions. The past six months have been rather difficult for both NVIDIA and consumer alike, as both sides have been eagerly awaiting the launch of the company's first Fermi based graphics cards. So now the long wait is over though, and AMD's Radeon HD 5800 series finally has some competition. Given the extra time NVIDIA spent on their GF100 release, can we expect that its latest releases can give the Radeon HD 5800 series a good run for its money? - Techgage

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 Fermi Card Version Review

Their road to GF100 has of course been a rough one, with NVIDIA being hit with one issue after another. Though the biggest hit has been the fact that ATI beat the company to the punch by a full six months, something that no doubt drives some of the company's execs up the wall. Another rather significant issue has been yields, which by the looks of things, actually could still be an issue. As you would expect with a product such as GF100, which is based on a revamped and rethought-out architecture, the improvements NVIDIA brings is going to make its aging GT200 architecture look out of date and puts it completely in the shadow.

The Fermi architecture designed by NVIDIA has been brewing for a while, though from an consumer perspective, we've been waiting a long six months to see the results come to fruition. Has the wait been worth it? We have to say that no, it wasn't. It's not that the GeForce GTX 480 is bad, but it doesn't come close to the leap we hoped for. For those who have held off on purchasing a high-end graphics card, there's just no reward for your patience. To dispel the notion that we might be anti GF100, let's clear up the obvious. This GeForce GTX 480 graphics card is the fastest single GPU on the planet, no question about that.

Like many others, we had high hopes for NVIDIA's GF100 architecture despite all the negative press that surrounded it since last fall. Even though it seemed just unlikely that Fermi would give AMD a true run for its money, there was always that hope. But it became clear in months past that GF100 wasn't going to deliver as we hoped it would. The company itself proved this by offering no performance previews outside of the Unigine benchmark. So who should purchase this card? Fans of NVIDIA, those who love PhysX and CUDA, and also those who want the best performance and can put up with the higher power draw and loud fan.