It’s now March which means Nvidia’s first, brand spanking new Fermi GPU will be launched later this month with the GTX470 and GTX480. Nvidia have revealed some benchmark tests on its new GPU’s against ATI’s great card the HD5870 and although you might be expecting a great increase in ability in Nvidia’s new graphics behemoth, the older Radeon certainly puts up a good fight.

The benchmark shown was on a demo, guesses are devised by Nvidia and not the usual gaming benchmarks most review sites do. Now across the board the new Fermi GPU performs only marginally better but what it does excel at is hardware tessellation(“In the subject of computer graphics, tessellation techniques are often used to manage datasets of polygons and divide them into suitable structures for rendering” – I looked that up on Wikipedia) although when all said and done until future graphic development actually makes use of hardware accelerated tessellation, the extra oomph the Fermi gives is probably a bit wasted.

Basically you can read this two ways, as it stands the new Fermi GPUs won’t be that much better than the current top ATI card but in the future may develop into the better GPU.