NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 570: Filling In The Gaps
by Ryan Smith on December 7, 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.
Bad Company 2 is another game where the GTX 570 takes a notable lead over the GTX 480, and is clearly exceeding the theoretical clockspeed advantages of the GTX 570 and drifting in to architectural optimizations. Unfortunately this advantage for the GTX 570 plays out best at lower resolutions, resulting in the gap disappearing by the time we hit 2560. Even at 1920 the advantage is barely worth mentioning, meaning we’re once more at parity with the GTX 480.
Perhaps it would have been better for NVIDIA if that advantage had held, because it means the Radeon 5870 gets uncomfortably close at higher resolutions. Negligible at 2560, the GTX 570 advantage is only 10% at 1920. AMD’s strong CF scaling also puts NVIDIA in a tough position here, as the 6850 CF is a whopping 32% faster than the GTX 570 when it comes to Bad Company 2.
NVIDIA does manage to turn the tables with our Waterfall benchmark however, which serves as a proxy for minimum framerates. The GTX 570 is still tied with the GTX 480 here, but it’s also now at parity with the 6850CF and over 50% faster than the 5870, easily demonstrating that if you’re worried more about minimums than averages in Bad Company 2 that the 5870 and GTX 570 aren’t nearly as close as they were at first glance. Extra RAM would probably be of great benefit to AMD here.
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Oxford Guy - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
Does Nvidia not want people to use Unigine since it showed the 480 beating the pants off the 580 in minimum frame rate at 1920x1200 and lower resolutions?I've noticed a definite lack of Unigine on review sites for the 570.
stangflyer - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Any idea why the 580 sli takes such a huge dump going from 1920 res to the 2560 res. It loses half its framerate! I has 1.5 gigs of memory vs the 5870 1 gig and the 5870 crossfire goes from 50 fps at 1920 and 37 at 2560. The 580 sli goes from 72 fps at 1920 to 36 at 2560.Any ideas??
SmCaudata - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
It seems that AMD is finally getting cross-fire scaling well. The new 68xx cars are better than the old, but the 5870 is scaling as well as the Nvidia cards in a lot of cases. My guess is that with cross-fire or SLI the memory bandwidth is less of an issue. You don't fully double your framerate afterall. It is likely more dependant on the GPU clock speed..which is an advantage for AMD.I am really just taking a guess here. The other option is that it is simply an immature driver and will be fixed later.
nitrousoxide - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
Only when you used a dual-AMD-card configuration you will realize how much you will suffer from its poor drivers. It's fast but buggy and I've been waiting too long for AMD to finally come up with a Catalyst that at least runs as stable as the nVidia driver. So please AMD, give us a nice driver!Anchen - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Hey,Good review overall for an apples to apples comparison. I would have liked to see what it did overclocked as some have mentioned. On the Metro 2033 page the article says the following:
"While Metro was an outstanding game for the GTX 580 to show off its performance advantage, the situation is quite different for the GTX 470. Here it once again fulfills its role as a GTX 480 replacement, but it’s far more mortal when it comes to being compared to other cards. "
In the first sentence shouldn't it be "...the situation is quite different for the GTX570." and not the 470?
sanityvoid - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Much as I love this site, the color schemes for the charts is really getting old. Why can't all the colors be the same EXCEPT for the one being reviewed. We're mostly all adults and can read so the other GPU's in the charts could be left all one color.Some other sites do this and it is much easier to read what is actually being reviewed, even if the review color is always the same on each chart. It still adds to the clutter of the charts. The human eye/brain gets distracted easy.
Other than that, another good job on the article.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
Thanks for the feedback.The colors are still a work in progress. We had some requests for additional colors in GPU articles to highlight the products we're immediately comparing the reviewed product to, which is what I did for this article. Certainly if you guys this this is too much, we can go back to fewer colors.
ATimson - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
Personally, my problem isn't so much that there are other colors, as that there's no good way to tell what they mean.Maybe one color for "other cards with benchmarks", one color for "immediate competition" (instead of each their own color), and a third for the product proper?
sanityvoid - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
I really like this idea. All one color for 'set' of reviews (if multiple), and one color for primary.BTW, I didn't know others were asking for more colors. I guess do what others want. For me, personally, I like the one color for primary and one color for all others. It is just the easiest for 'first glance' to be easily distinguishable.
Peace.
kirankowshik - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
I dont know why I should go for the Nvidia GTX 580 / 570 series when I am getting the same (almost or more than) performance with ATI Radeon cards for a lower price. ATI HD 5970 is almost 30$ cheaper than GTX 580 but outperforms it in every single test. 5870 is not very close but atleast some what close and the performance of GTX 570 over 5870 does not justify a $100 gap between these two. Anyways, I think NVIDIA is just producing cards for name sake..with HD6900 series coming up, I will not be surprised if they offer huge performance leap over the GTX 580/570 for the same price...Again it will be what NVIDIA was when ATI released their batch of first DX11 cards and NVIDIA was struggling hard to get an answer to those...