Gtx 580 Review

The first card to launch in a new series is usually the fastest. After AMD strayed from that by positioning its HD 6800 cards in the mid-range, it falls to Nvidia to drag the spotlight right back up to raw speed, which it certainly does: the GeForce GTX 580 is the company's new flagship, and it will cost a hefty £340 exc VAT.

It's been a mere eight months since the much-maligned GF100 Fermi core made its debut in the GTX 480, but Nvidia has made plenty of tweaks for this updated GF110 core. The main change concerns the arrangement of the GTX 580's three billion transistors.
Rather than sole use of the existing "fast" transistors, which were inefficient and bumped up both the temperature and power consumption, Nvidia has re-engineered them. Now there's a mix of fast transistors for more intensive tasks and slower transistors for less demanding work. This means less heat is lost, and so the GTX 580's core runs cooler and more efficiently.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 580
Nvidia has also tweaked the organisation of its stream processors. Gone are the 48-processor clusters of the GTX 460; instead Nvidia has gone back to 32-processor clusters, an updated take on the original GTX 480. There are more processors overall, though, with the GTX 580's 512 trumping the 480 of the previous flagship card.

The 772MHz core clock is joined by shaders running at 1,544MHz, and 1.5GB of GDDR5 RAM running at 4,008MHz, while the 40nm die boasts a throughput of 1,581.1 GFLOPs - an increase on the 1,344.96 GFLOPs of the GTX 480.

As expected, performance is through the roof. The GTX 580 ploughed through our standard Crysis benchmarks; we upped things to 1,920 x 1,080 and Very High quality, and it still managed an average of 54fps. That's 11fps faster than the AMD's fastest card - still the Radeon HD 5870 - and 9fps quicker than the GTX 480; only the HD 5970, at 64fps, is faster than the Nvidia card - but that's a dual-GPU card.
Gtx 580 Review