NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580: Fermi Refined
by Ryan Smith on November 9, 2010 9:00 AM ESTBattlefield: Bad Company 2
The latest game in the Battlefield series - Bad Company 2 – remains as one of the cornerstone DX11 games in our benchmark suite. As BC2 doesn’t have a built-in benchmark or recording mode, here we take a FRAPS run of the jeep chase in the first act, which as an on-rails portion of the game provides very consistent results and a spectacle of explosions, trees, and more.
Compared to the GTX 480, the GTX 580 has a rather straightforward 20% lead at both 2560 and 1920, once again surpassing our theoretical shader + clock numbers. Meanwhile in the SLI/CF camp this game has always favored AMD, so it’s not surprising to see the GTX 580 fall well behind the AMD multi-GPU solutions.
The waterfall minimum framerate test on the other hand usually erases any AMD lead and this is no exception. In spite of the GTX 580’s notably lower average framerate, here it pops ahead of its peers and falls just short of 30fps. Given the MP-centric design of the game, this could very well be the more important chart to look at.
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AnnonymousCoward - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - link
I'm with you, that AMD still has a superior performance per power design. But with the 580, nvidia took Fermi from being outrageous to competitive in that category, and even wins by a wide margin with idle power. Looking at the charts, the 580 also has a vastly superior cooling system to the 5970. Mad props to nvidia for turning things around.FragKrag - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
Still no SC2? :(Ryan Smith - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
Honestly, I ran out of time. I need to do a massive round of SC2 benchmarking this week, at which time it will be in all regular reviews and will be in Bench.ph3412b07 - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
There is always some debate as to the value of single gpu solutions vs multi gpu. I've noticed that the avg/max framerate in multi gpu setups is in fact quite good in some cases, but the min fps paints a different picture, with nearly all setups and various games being plagued by micro-stutter. Has anybody else come across this as reason to go with a more expensive single card?eXces - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
Why did u not include some overclocked 5970? Like u did with GTX 460 when u reviewed 6800 series?Ryan Smith - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - link
If you don't recall from our 5970 review, we disqualified our 5970 when running at 5870 clocks. The VRMs on the 5970 cannot keep up with the power draw on some real world applications, so it does not pass our muster at those speeds by even the loosest interpretation.529th - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
I knew OCCT was a culprit of causing problems.Ph0b0s - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
Was very interested to look at the review today to see how the new GTX580 and other DX11 card options are in comparison to my GTX 285 SLI setup. But unfortunately for the games I am playing BFBC2, Stalker etc and would base my descition on, I still don't know as my card is not represented. I know why,, becuase they are DX11 games and my card is DX10, but my card still runs them and I would want to know how they compare even if one is running DX10 and the other running DX11. Even Anandtech's chart system gives no measure for my cards in these games . Please sort this out. Just becuase a card does not run the latest version of directx does not mean it should be forgotten. Escpecially since the people most likley to be looking at upgrading are those with this generation of card rather than people with DX 11 hardware...mapesdhs - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - link
Don't worry, I'll have some useful info for you soon! 8800GT vs. 4890 vs. 460, in all
three cases testing 1 & 2 cards. You should be able to eaisly extrapolate from the
results to your GTX285 vs. 580 scenario. Send me an email (mapesdhs@yahoo.com)
and I'll drop you a line when the results are up. Data for 8800 GT vs. 4890 is already up:
http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/pctests.html
http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/stalkercopbench.txt
but I'm adding two more tests (Unigine and X3TC).
Ian.
juampavalverde - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
NVIDIA exceed AMD with this... as long as the barts should have been 6770, this fermi slight improvement just in this universe can be called 5xx series. it is just the gf100 done right, and should have been named properly, as gtx 490.