22 May 2020 - Graphics card reviewed

While some games have more powerful requirements than this GPU, the GeForce GTX 480 3-way SLI is only really challenged by the most demanding games released today, but normally it is more than capable of running games with a stable frame rate at 1080p. Capable of running games with up to a DirectX 11 requirement.

Here is a quick game performance synopsis for the AAA games played in 2020. In particular we focus on how well the GeForce GTX 480 3-way SLI runs at Ultra graphics settings and what frames per second it is getting at 1080p, 1440p and 4K monitor resolutions. When considering how well this graphics card can run the 1000 most demanding games available today it can best 250 of the games’ recommended graphics requirements.

First we looked at 1080p resolution for the GeForce GTX 480 3-way SLI performance to explore what sort of benchmarks it would achieve on the popular title Mafia 2: Definitive Edition and saw it deliver playable frames per second across the following graphics settings - Low: 103 FPS, Medium: 81 FPS, High: 55 FPS and Ultra: 39 FPS. We proceeded to look at Grand Theft Auto VI to see how that compared and predict that it will return a weak 0 FPS at Ultra 1080p.

As the PC gaming masses explore larger screen resolutions we decided to run some game checks at 1440p across a few popular games. We discovered the GeForce GTX 480 3-way SLI ran Mafia 2: Definitive Edition to a playable performance level. Results across the graphics settings looked like this, Low: 79 FPS, Medium: 62 FPS, High: 42 FPS and Ultra: 30 FPS. Another game researched was Grand Theft Auto VI with predictions of L: 0FPS, M: 0FPS, H: 0FPS, U: 0FPS. And then we checked graphics card performance on Doom Eternal, which returned L: 79FPS, M: 62FPS, H: 42FPS, U: 30FPS at 1440p. Getting popular modern games to run at 1440p on the GeForce GTX 480 3-way SLI is likely in need of some graphical option tweaks when trying to play modern games.

How many years will the GeForce GTX 480 3-way SLI graphics card play newly released games and how long until you should consider upgrading the GeForce GTX 480 3-way SLI in your PC? 12-18 months of top end gaming is still left in this graphics card

Whats a good PC graphics upgrade for the GeForce GTX 480 3-way SLI? A good upgrade choice for this graphics card today would be the 16 Series GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6GB. For comparison of the 1000 most demanding games around today this suggested upgrade is 54% better and can meet 864 of their recommended requirements. Alternatively upgrading this graphics card would have us consider the RX 5000 Series Radeon RX 5500 4GB which is 21% more powerful. This upgrade choice can also run 708 games from the most demanding games today.