NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580: A New Flagship Emerges
Test Setup & Unigine Heaven v2.1
How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the graphics cards in this article on a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 motherboard powered by a Core i7 965 quad-core processor and 6GB of OCZ DDR3-1333 RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the system BIOS and set all values to their "optimized" or "high performance" default settings. Then we manually configured the memory timings and disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the installation was complete we fully updated the OS and installed the latest hotfixes, along with the necessary drivers and applications.
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Hardware Used: |
Relevant Software: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 DirectX June 2010 Redist ATI Catalyst v10.10d NVIDIA GeForce Drivers 262.99 Benchmarks Used: Unigine Heaven v2.1 3DMark Vantage v1.0.1 H.A.W.X. FarCry 2 Just Cause 2 Alien vs. Predator Left 4 Dead 2* Enemy Territory: Quake Wars v1.5* * - Custom benchmark |
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The Unigine Heaven Benchmark v2.0 is built around the Unigine game engine. Unigine is a cross-platform real-time 3D engine, with support for DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11 and OpenGL. The Heaven benchmark--when run in DX11 mode--also makes comprehensive use of tessellation technology and advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion), and it also features volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm and a dynamic sky with light scattering. |
NVIDIA's Fermi-architecture based derivatives are partially known for their excellent geometry and tessellation capabilities, hence their strong performance in the Unigine Heaven benchmark. This test features and extreme tessellation load that's much more taxing than what is used is today's DX11 games, but it offers a clear view as to the relative tessellation performance of the GPUs we tested here. As you can see, the GeForce GTX 580 clearly leads the pack, easily besting even AMD's dual-GPU powered Radeon HD 5970.
