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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 in 2025: A Retrospective and Practical Advice

Analyzing outdated hardware in the era of ray tracing and neural networks

Introduction

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 is a legend from 2010, debuting as the flagship of the Fermi lineup. Fifteen years later, this graphics card has become an artifact of its time, yet it still piques the interest of enthusiasts and owners of old PCs. In this article, we will examine how relevant it is in 2025, what tasks it can perform, and whether it is worth considering for a build today.

1. Architecture and Key Features

Fermi Architecture: A Breakthrough of Its Time

The GTX 470 is built on the Fermi architecture (GF100), released using a 40nm manufacturing process. It was NVIDIA's first architecture to support DirectX 11, but it is lacking in modern features:

- RTX and ray tracing – absent;

- DLSS and AI accelerators – no Tensor cores;

- FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) – not supported.

Unique features for 2010 include:

- Compute Capability 2.0 – improved CUDA performance for parallel computing;

- PhysX – hardware acceleration for physics in games like Metro 2033.

Today, Fermi is a museum exhibit. Modern games and applications require support for DirectX 12 Ultimate and Vulkan, which the GTX 470 cannot handle.

2. Memory: Limitations of an Outdated Standard

- Type and Volume: GDDR5, 1280 MB (effectively 1.25 GB due to chip design);

- Bus: 320-bit;

- Bandwidth: 133.9 GB/s.

By 2025 standards, this is catastrophically inadequate. Even indie games like Hades consume up to 2–3 GB of VRAM at medium settings. Resolutions above 1080p (such as 1440p or 4K) are unattainable due to insufficient memory and low bandwidth.

3. Gaming Performance: Nostalgia for Low FPS

In 2025, the GTX 470 can only manage older titles and 2D indie games:

- CS:GO (720p, low settings) – 40–60 FPS;

- The Witcher 3 (720p, minimum settings) – 15–25 FPS (practically unplayable);

- Minecraft (without shaders) – 60–80 FPS.

Ray tracing is absent, as is support for FSR/DLSS. Even for 1080p in modern AAA games (like Cyberpunk 2077), the card is useless.

4. Professional Tasks: Museum Level

CUDA Cores (448) once allowed the GTX 470 to be used for rendering in Blender or video encoding. In 2025, this is pointless:

- Modern editors (DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro) require a minimum of 4 GB VRAM;

- Support for CUDA 2.0 is outdated — new software versions ignore it;

- Scientific calculations (machine learning, simulations) require cards with Tensor cores and 8+ GB of memory.

5. Power Consumption and Heat Generation: A “Heater” in Your Case

- TDP: 215 W — higher than many modern cards (for example, RTX 4060 — 115 W);

- Cooling Recommendations: A system with 2–3 fans is mandatory. Due to chip temperatures exceeding 90°C under load, the case must have good ventilation (at least 3 case fans).

Tip: Do not use the GTX 470 in compact cases (Mini-ITX) — the overheating risks are too high.

6. Comparison with Competitors

In 2010:

- AMD Radeon HD 5850 – lower power consumption (151 W), similar performance.

In 2025:

Even budget newcomers like Intel Arc A380 ($120) or AMD Radeon RX 6400 ($130) surpass the GTX 470 by 3–5 times in performance and support modern APIs.

7. Practical Advice for Enthusiasts

- Power Supply: No less than 500 W (considering the power supply's age);

- Compatibility: Motherboard with PCIe 2.0/3.0 (modern PCIe 4.0/5.0 is backwards compatible);

- Drivers: Official support ended in 2018. Use modified community drivers (such as NVCleanstall).

Caution: The card does not support UEFI Boot — there may be booting issues on new motherboards.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Extremely low price on the second-hand market ($15–30);

- Support for old games and OS (Windows XP, 7);

- Interest for collectors.

Cons:

- High power consumption;

- Noisy cooling system;

- Incompatibility with modern software;

- Risk of failure due to wear (15-year-old capacitors!).

9. Final Conclusion: Who Should Consider the GTX 470 in 2025?

This graphics card is suitable for:

1. Retro PC enthusiasts building systems from the 2000s;

2. Owners of old computers needing a replacement for a burnt-out GPU;

3. Educational purposes — studying Fermi architecture in history of hardware courses.

Do not consider the GTX 470 for: games released after 2015, video editing, machine learning, or 3D work. In 2025, even a budget RTX 3050 ($200) is ten times more powerful and supports all current technologies.

Conclusion

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 represents an important stage in the evolution of GPUs, but it has only retained historical value today. Unless you are a collector or a fan of retro games, invest $50–100 in a used GTX 1060 or RX 570: they will provide comfortable gaming and not turn your PC into a furnace.

Basic

Label Name

NVIDIA

Platform

Desktop

Launch Date

March 2010

Model Name

GeForce GTX 470

Generation

GeForce 400

Bus Interface

PCIe 2.0 x16

Transistors

3,100 million

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

40 nm

Architecture

Fermi

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

1280MB

Memory Type

GDDR5

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

320bit

Memory Clock

837MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

133.9 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

17.02 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

34.05 GTexel/s

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

136.1 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

1.067 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

SM Count

Multiple Streaming Processors (SPs), along with other resources, form a Streaming Multiprocessor (SM), which is also referred to as a GPU's major core. These additional resources include components such as warp schedulers, registers, and shared memory. The SM can be considered the heart of the GPU, similar to a CPU core, with registers and shared memory being scarce resources within the SM.

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

448

L1 Cache

64 KB (per SM)

L2 Cache

640KB

TDP

215W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

N/A

OpenCL Version

1.1

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 (11_0)

CUDA

2.0

Power Connectors

2x 6-pin

Shader Model

5.1

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Suggested PSU

550W

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

1.067 TFLOPS

Hashcat

Score

34753 H/s

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

Iris Pro Graphics P580

1.129 +5.8%

Radeon HD 6850M

1.102 +3.3%

GeForce GTX 470

1.067

Radeon HD 5750

1.028 -3.7%

Tesla M2075

1.007 -5.6%

Hashcat / H/s

GeForce GTX 560 Ti

36798 +5.9%

GeForce GTX 770M

35068 +0.9%

GeForce GTX 470

34753

Radeon R9 M275

33607 -3.3%

GeForce GTX 560

31509 -9.3%