NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 DirectX 11 GPU Review
Our Summary and Conclusion
Performance Summary: The new GeForce GTX 570 and EVGA GeForce GTX 570 SuperClocked cards performed very well throughout our battery of tests. Generally speaking, the GTX 570 performs at about the same level as the GeForce GTX 480, beating it in some tests, while trailing in others. The deltas were very small, however. When compared to competing Radeons, it’s only the more expensive, dual-GPU powered Radeon HD 5970 that’s faster. None of the single-GPU powered Radeon HD 5800 or 6800 series GPUs could come close to matching the performance of the GTX 570.
You may also have noticed that we’ve included two sets of numbers for the Radeon HD 5870. With all of the confusion surrounding a few optimizations in AMD’s drivers that affect image quality in some games and applications, and also result in shimmering artifacts on some textures, we thought it best to show how the 5870 performed with its drivers running at defaults and again with surface format optimizations disabled and high quality (HQ) filtering enabled. The effect on the Radeon’s performance varied from non-existent to significant. Whether this remains true with future driver releases remains to be seen and there’s still lots of information on this subject to digest.
The 3D graphics market is in a serious state of flux at the moment. We’ve got NVIDIA’s new GTX 500 series cards entering the market at the high-end, AMD’s Radeon 6800 series permeating the upper-mid-range, and arrival of Cayman-based Radeon HD 6900 series cards is imminent. Prices on many cards have been adjusted recently and will likely continue to bounce around a bit until the dust settles and both NVIDIA and AMD have played all of their cards, so to speak.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570
As the market stands today, the new GeForce GTX 570 appears to be an excellent option. Prices for reference GeForce GTX 570 cards should hover right around the $349 mark. The factory overclocked EVGA GeForce GTX 570 SuperClocked Edition we also took a look at here will be priced around $369. Neither card is cheap by any standard, but they’re about $100 less than most GeForce GTX 480s, yet perform at about the same level. If you’re looking for a high-end card, without the ultra high-end price, the GTX 570 fits the bill.
The GeForce GTX 570’s power consumption is still relatively high and the cards pump out a fair bit of heat, but noise is not an issue thanks to the newly designs vapor chamber coolers being used on the cards and performance is excellent. Radeon HD 5870 series cards—which technically remain AMD’s fastest single GPUs—have gotten much cheaper as of late and can be had for about $50 to $90 less than the GTX 570, but GTX 570’s significantly better performance makes the additional investment easily justifiable if you’re looking for a card in this class. We still have to see how Cayman performs to fully understand how the GPU performance landscape will be shaped over the next few months, but as it stands today, the new GeForce GTX 570 is a compelling option to say the least.
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