NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580: Fermi Refined
by Ryan Smith on November 9, 2010 9:00 AM ESTFinal Thoughts
Even though NVIDIA is only launching a single card today there’s a lot to digest, so let’s get to it.
Since the GeForce GTX 580 arrived in our hands last week, we’ve been mulling over how to approach it. It boils down to two schools of thought: 1) Do we praise NVIDIA for delivering a high performance single GPU card that strikes the right balance of performance and temperature/noise, or 2) Do we give an indifferent thumbs-up to NVIDIA for only finally delivering the card that we believe the GTX 480 should have been.
The answer we’ve decided is one of mild, but well earned praise. The GTX 580 is not the true next-generation successor to the GTX 480; it’s the GTX 480 having gone back in the womb for 7 months of development. Much like AMD, NVIDIA faced a situation where they were going to do a new product without a die shrink, and had limited options as a result. NVIDIA chose wisely, and came back with a card that is both decently faster and a refined GTX 480 at the same time.
With the GTX 480 we could recognize it as being the fastest single GPU card on the market, but only by recognizing the fact that it was hot and loud at the same time. For buyers the GTX 480 was a tradeoff product – sure it’s fast, but is it too hot/too loud for me? The GTX 580 requires no such tradeoff. We can never lose sight of the fact that it’s a high-end card and is going to be more power hungry, louder, and hotter than many other cards on the market, but it’s not the awkward card that the GTX 480 was. For these reasons our endorsement of the GTX 580 is much more straightforward, at least as long as we make it clear that GTX 580 is less an upgrade for GTX 480, and more a better upgrade for the GTX 285 and similar last-generation cards.
What we’re left with today is something much closer to the “traditional” state of the GPU market: NVIDIA has the world’s fastest single-GPU card, while AMD is currently nipping at their heels with multi-GPU products. Both the Radeon HD 5970 and Radeon HD 6870 CF are worthy competitors to the GTX 580 – they’re faster and in the case of the 6870 CF largely comparable in terms of power/temperature/noise. If you have a board capable of supporting a pair of 6870s and don’t mind the extra power it’s hard to go wrong, but only if you’re willing to put up with the limitations of a multi-GPU setup. It’s a very personal choice – we’d be willing to trade the performance for the simplicity of avoiding a multi-GPU setup, but we can’t speak for everyone.
So what’s next? A few different things. From the NVIDIA camp, NVIDIA is promising a quick launch of the rest of the GeForce 500 series. Given the short development cycles for NVIDIA we’d expect more refined GF10x parts, but this is very much a shot in the dark. Much more likely is a 3GB GTX 580, seeing as how NVIDIA's official product literature calls the GTX 580 the "GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB", a distinction that was never made for the GTX 480.
More interesting however will be what NVIDIA does with GF110 since it’s a more capable part than GF100 in every way. The GF100 based Quadros and Teslas were only launched in the last few months, but they’re already out of date. With NVIDIA’s power improvements in particular, this seems like a shoo-in for at least one improved Quadro and Tesla card. We also expect 500 series replacements for some of the GF100-based cards (with the GTX 465 likely going away permanently).
Meanwhile the AMD camp is gearing up for their own launches. The 6900 series is due to launch before the year is out, bringing with it AMD’s new Cayman GPU. There’s little we know or can say at this point, but as a part positioned above the 6800 series we’re certainly hoping for a slugfest. At $500 the GTX 580 is pricey (much like the GTX 480 before it), and while this isn’t unusual for the high-end market we wouldn’t mind seeing NVIDIA and AMD bring a high-intensity battle to the high-end, something that we’ve been sorely missing for the last year. Until we see the 6900 series we wouldn’t make any bets, but we can certainly look forward to it later this year.
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deeps6x - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
Really, who has to have this card when for less money, you can get better results with a pair of 460s in SLI or a pair of 6850s in CF (even better than 460s in almost all cases) to give you better numbers than this card.Take the extra $100+ and bump your CPU up a speed bin or two.
Alberto8793 - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
I will give Nvidia some props they have a very fast card, but interms of performance per dollar, AMD beats them out, go to newegg and click on the 5970 its 499$, go and check the 580, a cool 560$ now return to the anandtech review and check out the benchmarks, they speak for themselves, and finnally load and idle consumption of a two gpu card are lower than a single gpu?!?!?!?!? OUTRAGEOUS!slick121 - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - link
I mean this is the "enough said!" post. So true, totally agree!ClagMaster - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
Looks like Nvidia has done their homework optimize the GF100 after business pressures to release the GTX-480.Nvidia did a competent makeover of the GF100 and GTX-480 to reduce power, heat and noise.
The GF-110/GTX-580 offers about 10% more performance for the Watts, which are still too high. for my liking.
AnnonymousCoward - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - link
I think it's more like 30% more performance per watt. Crysis power is 389W vs 421W and averages 15% more fps.the_elvino - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - link
I would take Anand's power consumtion measurements of 421W for the GTX 480 and 389W for GTX 590 with a few pinches of salt.HardOCP compared the power draw in SLI and recorded following numbers for the entire system under full load:
GTX 480 SLI: 715W
GTX 590 SLI: 700W
Difference per card between 480 and 590: 7,5W!
The 590 is noticeably cooler though.
http://hardocp.com/article/2010/11/09/nvidia_gefor...
7Enigma - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - link
Why would HardOCP's numbers be any more accurate than Anand's? One is comparing SLI and one is single card. We have no clue the differences in system configuration (individual variances of parts not the part name), not to mention the inherent variability of the cards themselves.I've said it in the 6850 article and before but power consumption numbers (and thus noise/heat) have to be taken with a grain of salt because there is no independent unbiased source giving these cards for review. A really good or poor cherry-picked sample can completely change the impression of a cards efficiency. And since we know NVIDIA ships cards with varying load voltages it is very easy to imagine a situation where one card would be similar in power draw to the 480 while another would show lower thermals.
Anand/Ryan I've said it before and I'll say it again, you have the chance to be a pioneer in the review field by getting independent sources of cards slightly after release. Yes your original review would have to exclude this (or have a caveat that this is what the manufacturer supplied you with).
Decide on a good number (3-5 shouldn't be unreasonable), and purchase these from etailers/locally anonymously. Test them for power/noise/temp and then either sell them on Ebay at slightly reduced cost or even increased price? (Anandtech approved!...touched by Ryan himself!....whatever....you've got a marketing department) :), and/or take one/all and give them away to your loyal readers like the other contests.
Then have a followup article with the comparisons between the "real" cards and the cherry-picked ones from NVIDIA/AMD. Just think how if the manufacturers know that you might call them out on a cherry-picked sample in a follow-up review, they might just try to avoid the bad press and ship one more closely in line with the product line.
Goblerone - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
I'm confused here. In your review of ATI's new 6870, you were comparing against factory overclocked NVIDIA cards but here you are using reference ATI cards.What gives?
AnandThenMan - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - link
Why even bother asking. It's clear that Anandtech is not about fairness in reviews anymore. Nvidia got special treatment, plain and simple.Just wait until we see Anandtech preview AMD's Brazos with some benches, you will see even more bizarre and head scratching benchmarks. Wait and see.
Sihastru - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - link
Lol, give it a rest man... and while you're at it tells us about some similarly priced factory overclocked cards that AMD has on the stores shelves and could be used at the time the review was conducted. Relevent models only please, that have the same performance as the GTX580.