NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580: Fermi Refined
by Ryan Smith on November 9, 2010 9:00 AM ESTMass Effect 2
Electronic Arts’ space-faring RPG is our Unreal Engine 3 game. While it doesn’t have a built in benchmark, it does let us force anti-aliasing through driver control panels, giving us a better idea of UE3’s performance at higher quality settings. Since we can’t use a recording/benchmark in ME2, we use FRAPS to record a short run.
Mass Effect 2 has always surprised us by just how strenuous it is, even though UE3 is intended to be flexible to reach a wide range of systems. Furthermore it doesn’t seem to benefit nearly as much from the GTX 580 as other games, with the performance advantage over the GTX 480 shrinking to around 13%. The ultimate victor ends up being the AMD multi-GPU setups, and farther above that still is the GTX 470 SLI.
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Pantsu - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
A good article, and a good conclusion overall. Much better that the fiasko that was the 6800-article.I do lament the benchmarking method AT uses though. Benchmarks like the Crysis Warhead one are not really representative of real world performance, but tend to be a bit too "optimized". They do not reflect real world performance very well, and even skew the results between cards.
carage - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
No DOLBY/DTS HD bitstream = epic fail as far as HTPC usage is concerned.Thank you nVidia for failing again this round.
Sihastru - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
Yes, you must be one of the only two persons in the world that was considering the most powerfull GPU on the planet for a HTPC setup.carage - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
And somehow you still buy into the argument that mid-end offerings at half the price has more features than the top of the line card?nVidia has been doing this since 6800 era...
QuagmireLXIX - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - link
And I am the other :) What some people don't see is that someone may only want 1 desktop to do everything well.buildingblock - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
I'm impressed that my local hardware dealer here in the UK has no less than 5 GTX 580s in stock today. It also includes, yes in stock, the first overclocked 580 the Palit Sonic which has a 835 Mhz CPU up from 772, 4200 memory up from 4008, and 1670 shaders up from 1544. All this for about 5% more than the price of the standard Palit GTX 580.buildingblock - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
I meant 5 different makes of GTX 580 of course.mapesdhs - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
Are you near Bolton by any chance? ;D
If not, which company?
Btw, shop around, the Sonic is 30 cheaper elsewhere.
Ian.
buildingblock - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
I was looking at a standard Palit GTX 580 for £380, and the Sonic version for £398. These were about the best prices I could find today.nitrousoxide - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
But how far it can go depends on its counterpart, the HD6970.