NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580: A New Flagship Emerges

Name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580: A New Flagship Emerges - Page 4
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, November 09, 2010, 09:00 AM EDT

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage

Synthetic DirectX Gaming

3DMark Vantage

The latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark Vantage, is specifically bound to Windows Vista-based systems because it uses some advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 10, which y isn't available on previous versions of Windows. 3DMark Vantage isn't simply a port of 3DMark06 to DirectX 10 though. With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, in addition to support for the latest PC hardware. We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark Vantage's Extreme preset option, which uses a resolution of 1920x1200 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.

3DMark Vantage paints an interesting picture. As you can see, in comparison to any single-GPU powered AMD-based graphics card, the GeForce GTX 580 is simply a monster. It outperforms the Radeon HD 5870 by a wide margin. The dual-GPU powered--and year old, we might add--Radeon HD 5970, however, pulled well ahead of the GTX 580, mostly due to its strong performance in GPU Test 1.

	6870	6850	5870	5850	5970	GTX 460	GTX 470	GTX 480	GTX 580
% Increase	88.0%	90.9%	74.8%	76.4%	67.6%	91.3%	90.2%	76.2%	78.2%

The tables turn in our multi-GPU tests. Due to suprerior scaling, the GeForce GTX 580 SLI configuration is the fastest of the bunch, outperforming even the four GPUs that comprise the Radeon HD 5970 CrossFire configuration and decimating the pair of Radeon HD 5870s.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, Gaming, graphics, GPU, dx11, GTX 580

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com