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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cjb110 - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
"The thermal pads connecting the memory to the shroud have once again wiped out the chip markets", wow powerful adhesive that! Bet Intel's pissed.cjb110 - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
"While the difference is’ earthshattering, it’s big enough..." nt got dropped, though not yet at my workplace:)Invader Mig - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
I don't know the stance on posting links to other reviews since I'm a new poster, so I wont. I would like to make note that in another review they claim to have found a work around the power throttling that allowed them to use furmark to get accurate temps and power readings. This review has the 580 at 28w above the 480 at max load. I don't mean to step on anyone's toe's, but I have seen so many different numbers because of this garbage nvidia has pulled, and the only person who claims to have furmark working gets higher numbers. I would really like to see something definitive.7Enigma - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
Here's my conundrum. What is the point of something like Furmark that has no purpose except to overstress a product? In this case the 580 (with modified X program) doesn't explode and remains within some set thermal envelope that is safe to the card. I like using Crysis as it's a real-world application that stresses the GPU heavily.Until we have another game/program that is used routinely (be it game or coding) that surpasses the heat generation and power draw of Crysis I just don't see the need to try to max out the cards with a benchmark. OC your card to the ends of the earth and run something real, that is understandable. But just using a program that has no real use to artificially create a power draw just doesn't have any benefit IMO.
Gonemad - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
I beg to differ. (be careful, high doses of flaming.)Let me put it like this. The Abrams M1 Tank is tested on a 60º ramp (yes, that is sixty degrees), where it must park. Just park there, hold the brakes, and then let go. It proves the brakes on a 120-ton 1200hp vehicle will work. It is also tested on emergency brakes, where this sucker can pull a full stop from 50mph on 3 rubber-burning meters. (The treads have rubber pads, for the ill informed).
Will ever a tank need to hold on a 60º ramp? Probably not. Would it ever need to come to a screeching halt in 3 meters? In Iraqi, they probably did, in order to avoid IEDs. But you know, if there were no prior testing, nobody would know.
I think there should be programs specifically designed to stress the GPU in unintended ways, and it must protect itself from destruction, regardless of what code is being thrown at it. NVIDIA should be grateful somebody pointed that out to them. AMD was thankful when they found out the 5800 series GPUs (and others, but this was worse) had lousy performance on 2D acceleration, or none at all, and rushed to fix its drivers. Instead, NVIDIA tries to cheat Furmark by recognizing its code and throttling. Pathetic.
Perhaps someday, a scientific application may come up with repeatable math operations that just behave exactly like Furmark. So, out of the blue, you got a $500 worth of equipment that gets burned out, and nobody can tell why??? Would you like that happening to you? Wouldn't you like to be informed that this or that code, at least, could destroy your equipment?
What if Furmark wasn't designed to stress GPUs, but it was an actual game, (with furry creatures, lol)?
Ever heard of Final Fantasy XIII killing off PS3s for good, due to overload, thermal runaway, followed by meltdown? Rumors are there, if you believe them is entirely to you.
Ever heard of Nissan GTR (skyline) being released with a top-speed limiter with GPS that unlocks itself when the car enters the premises of Nissan-approved racetracks? Inherent safety, or meddling? Can't you drive on a Autoban at 300km/h?
Remember back in the day of early benchmark tools, (3DMark 2001 if I am not mistaken), where the Geforce drivers detected the 3DMark executable and cheated the hell out of the results, and some reviewers got NVIDIA red-handed when they renamed and changed the checksum of the benchmark??? Rumors, rumors...
The point is, if there is a flaw, a risk of an unintended instruction kill the hardware, the buyer should be rightfully informed of such conditions, specially if the company has no intention at all to fix it. Since Anand warned us, they will probably release the GTX 585 with full hardware thermal safeties. Or new drivers. Or not.
Just like the instruction #PROCHOT was inserted in the Pentium (which version?) and some reviewers tested it against an AMD chip. I never forgot that AMD processor billowing blue smoke the moment the heatsink was torn off. Good PR, bad PR. The video didn´t look fake to me back then, just unfair.
In the end, it becomes matter of PR. If suddenly all the people that played Crysis on this card caused it to be torched, we would have something really interesting.
Sihastru - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
AMD has a similar system in place since the HD4xx0 generation. Remember when Furmark used to blow up 48x0 cards? Of course not. But look it up...What nVidia did here is what AMD has in all their mid/high end cards since HD4xx0. At least nVidia will only throttle when it detects Furmark/OCCT. AMD cards will throttle in any situation if the power limiter requires it.
JimmiG - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
It's a very unfortunate situation that both companies are to blame for. That's what happens when you push the limits of power consumption and heat output too far while at the same time trying to keep manufacturing costs down.The point of a stress test is to push the system to the very limit (but *not* beyond it, like AMD and Nvidia would have you believe). You can then be 100% assured that it will run all current and future games and HPC applications, not matter what unusual workloads they dump on your GPU or CPU, without crashes or reduced performance.
cactusdog - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
So if you want to use multiple monitors do you still need 2 cards to run it or have they enabled a third monitor on the 580?Sihastru - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
Yes.Haydyn323 - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
The 580 as with the previous generation still only supports 2 monitors max per card.