NVIDIA has just officially launched their GeForce GTX480 (codenamed Fermi) graphics card that supports DirectX 11. NVIDIA claims that gaming performance is “1.5-2x” higher than the GeForce GTX 285 – which is a substantial amount, even by historical GPU upgrade standards. For many games, the GTX 480 is around 10%-20% faster than the AMD 5870. That said, the big difference comes from the GF GTX 480 DX11 tessellation engine that scales much (very much!) better than AMD’s implementation. NVIDIA gets the absolute single GPU performance crown back, but in terms of value and power consumption, and for today’s games, the AMD offering is still very relevant, if not better, depending on your needs. As future games use tessellation, the difference will grow. That’s the bottom-line, but if you really want to look at all the details, I recommend reading the full review on Anandtech or PCPers. It’s probably too geeky for most, but that’s where you’ll find all the small details.