With all the GTX 460 news swirling around the industry, I thought I would take a step back and take a different angle at the older, but very powerful, GTX 480 from MSI. Tessellation performance and GPGPU application support are two areas where I focused on, and the results I have found are somewhat telling about the state of tessellation in the graphics industry.

I believe Fermi can be a very successful architecture. The only problem is that it did not line up with the 28 nm process that will be introduced next year. In many ways the GTX 480 is more in line with the Radeon HD 2800XT than the aforementioned GeForce FX 5800 in terms of designing a part a little too aggressive considering the process technology at hand. But the significant difference between the GTX 480 and those products is that it actually performs where it should, and is a class leader in terms of features and functionality.