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One could think of the GeForce GTX 580 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. NVIDIA’s GTX 480 was very fast but they waited till now to release the full part.
The GTX 580 has 512 CUDA cores. NVIDIA splits the CUDA cores into four Graphics Processing Clusters each of which has 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. It should be interesting to see performance numbers of the 580.
One thing that needs to be talked about is that the GeForce GTX 580 is reengineered at the transistor level meaning that NVIDIA was able to engineer a higher clock speed for the 580 compared to the 480 while also increasing the CUDA core count and improving the power draw at the same time. NVIDIA says the TDP of the 580 is 244W compared to the TDP of the 480 of 250W.
One of the main features of the GeForce GTX 580 is the ability to run DirectX 11 features like Tessellation and DirectCompute. The 580 has 16 Polymorph engines meaning that it should offer higher Tessellation performance than the 480 across the board. As we’ll see in the Uningine benchmark performance is up to 33% faster in that benchmark compared to 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 will use 1.5 million triangles for the terrain alone.
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.
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.
• 512 CUDA Cores
• 10.5” Length
• 4 GPC
• 16 SMs
• 16 PolyMorph Engines
• 64 texture units
• Full-speed FP 16 filtering
• 772MHz Core Clock speed
• 1544MHz Shader Clock Speed
• 2008MHz memory clock speed
• GDDR5 memory
• 384-bit memory interface
• 192.4GB/second memory bandwidth
• 1536MB memory
• Vapor Chamber Cooling design
• 6+8-pin power
• 244W TDP
• 2 Billion triangles per second throughput via tessellation
• Endless City
• 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 3.1
