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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donjuancarlos - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
Along that line it's shoo-in, not shoe-in. :)Ryan Smith - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!Thanks for the heads up, Don.
Troll Trolling - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
You guys made my day.samspqr - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
more important, where it says:"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."
it should say:
"Both the Radeon HD 5970 and Radeon HD 6870 CF come out on top of the GTX 580 – they’re faster in nearly all benchmarks, and in both cases largely comparable in terms of price, power and temperature; 6870CF is also comparable in terms of noise, while 5970 comes out significantly louder."
DominionSeraph - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
No, it should say, "Both 6850 CF and GTX460 SLI blow everything else out of the water given that they're practically giving away the highly overclockable 6850's for ~$185, 1GB GTX 460's for ~$180 AR, and 768MB GTX 460's for $145 AR."DreamerX5521 - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
by looking at the test results, I guess 6870CF is a better choice than a single 580 in term of performance/watt, price (about the same), temperature, noise, etc..Kim Leo - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
I noticed that as well, a little surprising I did expect a bit more considering all the hype, but then again it's built on the Fermi.I'm not sure what's up with the pricing? Do they think that there will be a market for GTX480 when Cayman comes and with the GF110 out?
Sihastru - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
If you can live with the sub-par minimum framerates that plagues so many games with CF setups.JarredWalton - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
Amen. I'm a 5850 CF user (and 4870X2 before that), and I can tell you I'd much rather have a single GPU and forget about profiles and other issues. But then, 30" LCDs need more than a single GPU in most games.B3an - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - link
30" monitors dont need anything more than a high-end single GPU for most games. 99.9% of PC games are playable maxed out plus AA at 2560 res with just one of my 5870's in use, of with my previous 480. Theres only a handful of games that need dual GPU's to be playable at this res. Mainly because most games are console ports these days.And the OP is wrong, 6870 CF is not any better than the 580 with temperature or noise. 580 being better under load with noise, better with temps at idle, but only very slightly hotter under load.