NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 Launch Review

•                  480 CUDA Cores

•                  4 GPC

•                  15 SMs

•                  15 PolyMorph Engines

•                  60 texture units

•                  40 ROPs

•                  640KB L2 Cache

•                  43.9Gigatexels/second texture filtering rate

•                  3 Billion transistors

•                  Full-speed FP 16 filtering

•                  732MHz Core Clock speed

•                  1464MHz Shader Clock Speed

•                  3800MHz memory clock speed

•                  GDDR5 memory

•                  320-bit memory interface

•                  152GB/second memory bandwidth

•                  1280MB memory

•                  Vapor Chamber Cooling design

•                  2x 6-pin power

•                  219W TDP

•                  3-way SLI

•                  Optimized for SLI cover design

•                  External venting

•                  New adaptive GPU fan control

•                  2-Slots

•                  DL DVI x2

•                  mini-HDMI

•                  3D Vision

•                  3D Vision Surround

•                  NVIDIA Surround

•                  Tile formats that support Z-cull efficiency

•                  Full-speed FP16 texture filtering

•                  DirectX 11

•                  CUDA

•                  PhysX

•                  OpenGL 4.1

•                  32X FSAA

Here’s a chart of the GeForce GTX 570 along with the other currently released cards. You will notice that I have chosen to ignore AMD’s products except for the recently released HD 6870 and HD 6850 cards. AMD is set to release their new high-end cards the Cayman series very shortly and it should be an interesting battle.

One could think of the GeForce GF110 chip as a fixed full-speed GTX 480. If you might remember, NVIDIA launched the GTX 480 with 480 CUDA cores enabled, instead of the 512 originally specified when the architecture was announced last year at the GPU Technology Conference. They also released a GTX 470 which had 448 CUDA cores. The GF110 chip is built on 40nm process with 3 Billion transistors.

The GTX 570 has 480 CUDA cores. NVIDIA splits the CUDA cores into four Graphics Processing Clusters each of which has 3 or 4 Shader Multiprocessors. Each SM contains 32 CUDA cores. If you might remember the GeForce GTX 480 had 4 GPCs 3 or 4 SMs per GPC and 32 CUDA cores for a total of 4 GPCS, 15 SMs and 480 CUDA cores meaning the 570 has the same configuration of cores as the 480.

One thing that needs to be talked about is that the GF110 is reengineered at the transistor level meaning that NVIDIA was able to engineer a higher clock speed for the 570 compared to the 470 while also increasing the CUDA core count and improving the power draw at the same time. NVIDIA says the TDP of the 570 is 219W compared to the TDP of the 580 of 244W. Two GTX 570 cards on the same system require 438W of power by themselves.

One of the main features of the GeForce GTX 580 is the ability to run DirectX 11 features like Tessellation and DirectCompute. The 570 has 15 Polymorph engines meaning that it should offer higher Tessellation performance than the 470 across the board in Tessellation performance and slightly higher than the 480 due to the higher clock speed of the 570 versus the 480.

Tessellation is a process where you can increase the geometry of a character or terrain by using a base mesh and subdividing the triangles into a finer mesh of triangles. In AVP, the developer used Tessellation to make the Aliens rib cage stand out instead of flat with it disabled. HAWX2 uses Tessellation to generate terrain with realistic shadows and geometry in the mountains. HAWX 2 uses 1.5 million triangles for the terrain alone.

One of the things NVIDIA did with the GF110 was implement full speed FP16 filtering compared to the half-speed found on the GF100 chip. This is a holdover from the GF104 chip which introduced the feature and should improve performance in filtering operations. The GeForce GTX 570 also has a Vapor Chamber cooler which is slightly different than the one found on the 580. There are also improvements to the Z-Cull on this chip.

NVIDIA released the GeForce GTX 285 with support for 3D Vision. 3D Vision allows you to play games in stereoscopic 3D requiring the use of 120Hz monitors and a set of 3D Vision glasses from NVIDIA to use.  Games like Left 4 Dead 2 and many others support 3D Vision including Lost Planet 2. Playing games in 3D is sort of like watching Avatar in 3D for the first time.  Hand in hand with 3D Vision NVIDIA recently announced 3D Vision Surround which allows their cards to play games on three monitors with 3D Vision on or off. This requires two cards running in SLI mode, but has the advantage of near double the performance of a single card.  Turning on both 3D Vision and Surround has a profound effect on frame rate so two cards are better than one in this regard. It also requires three identical 120Hz monitors which I don’t currently have.

Ageia introduced the PhysX API several years ago and NVIDIA bought the small company after they released a standalone card to do game physics on the dedicated PhysX card instead of the CPU. With the purchase of Ageia, NVIDIA has developed PhysX to be in many games that show off some amazing effects including destructible terrain, smoke, fog, glass effects and so much more. Several recent games including Mafia II, Just Cause 2 and others. With 480 CUDA cores the 570 should offer excellent PhysX performance. Of course as an NVIDIA-exclusive feature PhysX only operates in games that have the feature.