NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580: A New Flagship Emerges

Name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580: A New Flagship Emerges - Page 6
Brand: NVIDIA

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

FarCry 2

DirectX Gaming Performance

FarCry 2

Like the original, FarCry 2 is one of the more visually impressive games to be released on the PC to date. Courtesy of the Dunia game engine developed by Ubisoft, FarCry 2's game-play is enhanced by advanced environment physics, destructible terrain, high resolution textures, complex shaders, realistic dynamic lighting, and motion-captured animations. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this article with a fully patched version of FarCry 2, using one of the built-in demo runs recorded in the "Ranch" map. The test results shown here were run at various resolutions with 4X AA enabled.

As we've seen previously, in comparison to other single-GPU powered cards, the new GeForce GTX 580 is a powerhouse. In the FarCry 2 benchmark, the GTX 580 easily bests all of the other single-GPU powered cards and significantly outpaces the Radeon HD 5800 and 6800 series cards. The Radeon HD 5970, however, leads the pack.

	6870	6850	5870	5850	5970	GTX 460	GTX 470	GTX 480	GTX 580
% Increase	84.7%	95.8%	62%	69.8%	21.7%	77.3%	71.5%	48.1%	30.8%

Things tighten up in the multi-GPU FarCry 2 tests and the new GTX 580 SLI config is able to surpass the Radeon HD 5970 CrossFire setup at 1920x1200, but at the higher resolution, a pair of AMD's most powerful cards (at least currently), take the lead.

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