Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 Review

After the rather lukewarm reception of the GTX 480, this is certainly welcome news to fans of NVIDIA. Even more welcoming is that the GTX 580 is expected to launch before the end of the year. In fact, Huang said that he's hopeful it'll be on the market by this summer. But what about a price? A separate NVIDIA source who will remain anonymous for obvious reasons let us in on a little secret - the GTX 580 will launch with the GTX 480's current price. The best part of that tidbit may be the obvious implication - a price drop on the 400 series! So if you're in the market for a new video card, it may be wise to wait until the summer...if you can hold off that long.

oday we know the GTX 580 is indeed very real, and it is designed for one purpose: to be the fastest single-GPU graphics card in the world. This is not an unfeasible accomplishment, as the GTX 480 currently holds that title, which sets the GTX 580 up to become NVIDIA's current flagship product. In addition to raw gaming power, the GTX 580 is also designed to supply better performance per watt than the GTX 480 and features a newly designed cooling solution to increase overall efficiency. Both of these are areas where the GTX 480 was hardest hit by the press, so we will be looking closely at these two aspects of the new card in the review. Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 Review

Needless to say, the listing is now gone from Nvidia.com, but the leak confirms the speculation that the new card will be available soon and will be competing against AMD’s forthcoming Radeon HD 6900 series of boards. The 580 is rumored to have 512 CUDA cores, 2GB of DDR5 memory, and 128 texture units, according to Fudzilla. It will supposedly be based on the new 40nm GF110 GPU, and like previous Fermi cards, should be a power-guzzling beast.

The GTX 580 is what you would call the tip of Fermi’s “mid-life kicker” iceberg and is meant to keep the title of the world’s fastest DX11 GPU firmly within NVIDIA’s grasp. To do this, their engineers took the GF100 architecture and basically optimized it for better overall performance, lower power consumption and greater efficiency throughout the rendering pipeline. The result is a revised GF 100 core named the GF110 which has rendering power where it counts and should compete well against AMD’s upcoming high end offerings. Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 Review

At it is most basic, the GTX 580 uses a full-enabled GF100 core with additional rendering and efficiency features walking hand in hand with some transistor rationalization on a microarchitectural level. Considering the outgoing GTX 480’s raw and unadulterated horsepower along with the possibilities of the GF110, not many will likely complain about these improvements necessitating a change in product family names. Especially when you consider the GTX 580 is only the beginning of NVIDIA’s top to bottom refresh.