Moving on, we have the GTX 470 to discuss. It’s not NVIDIA’s headliner so it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. With a price right between the 5850 and 5870, it delivers performance right where you’d expect it to be. At 5-10% slower than the 5870 on average, it’s actually a straightforward value proposition: you get 90-95% of the performance for around 87% of the price. It’s not a huge bargain, but it’s competitively priced against the 5870. Against the 5850 this is less true where it’s a mere 2-8% faster, but this isn’t unusual for cards above $300 – the best values are rarely found there. The 5850 is the bargain hunter’s card, otherwise if you can spend more pick a price and you’ll find your card. Just keep in mind that the GTX 470 is still going to be louder/hotter than any 5800 series card

Fermi’s compute-heavy and tessellation-heavy design continues to interest us but home users won’t find an advantage to that design today. This is a card that bets on the future and we don’t have our crystal ball. With some good consumer-oriented GPGPU programs and developers taking up variable tessellation NVIDIA could get a lot out of this card, or if that fails to happen they could get less than they hoped for.

Finally, as we asked in the title, was it worth the wait? No, probably not. A 15% faster single-GPU card is appreciated and we’re excited to see both AMD and NVIDIA once again on competitive footing with each other, but otherwise with much of Fermi’s enhanced abilities still untapped, we’re going to be waiting far longer for a proper resolution anyhow. For now we’re just happy to finally have Fermi, so that we can move on to the next step.

While we’re sure the company wishes it was shipping 512-shader cards instead of pared-down boards, it’s hitting high-enough clocks to make GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470 generally-faster than Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850. This is especially true when you turn on anti-aliasing, as the new GeForce cards take a much smaller hit than their competition.

What about the bad? Well, getting your feet in the door here costs $350. A flagship GeForce GTX 480 runs $500. Radeon HD 5850s recently dropped back down to $300 and Radeon HD 5870s can be found around $400. Though the GeForce cards are faster than their single-GPU competition, the premium is hard to swallow if power and display connectivity are important to you, and less-so if PhysX, CUDA, or 3D Vision are more interesting. Do we expect AMD to drop its prices in response? Don’t count on it.

So, if you break everything down into power, price, and performance (meaning you’re most concerned with how GeForce GTX 480 and 470 stand up in today’s games), then today’s preview comes off somewhat underwhelming after the build-up.