Introducing Nvidia’s GTX 580 – Fermi Improved!
Serious Sam Second Encounter HD (2010) 
Serious Sam is the title of a series of first-person shooters created by the Croatian development team Croteam. It follows the adventures of its hero Sam “Serious” Stone and his fight against the forces of the extraterrestrial overlord Mental who seeks to destroy humanity. It’s gameplay is a throwback to early first-person shooters like Quake and Doom with the twist of being set in wide-open environments with large groups of enemies attacking at any time, and there are many hidden areas and treasures to find and puzzles to solve.
Serious Sam features cooperative gameplay and allows for split screen action supporting up to 4 players. Serious Sam: The Second Encounter was remade as “HD” using Serious Engine 3. It was released in April, 2010 for PC. Besides updated visuals, new game modes including “Co-op Tournament” and “Survival” for single player, were introduced in this remake. Serious Sam 3 is currently in development by Croteam and is expected to debut at E3, 2011. We use the basic 3 “ultra” presets for benching Serious Sam: The Second Encounter HD. There are possible further fine-tuning which will make the game even more demanding, but we chose the “ultra” presets with only one higher GPU setting, to allow for testing beyond 1920×1080. We test first at 2560×1600 resolution:
And finally at 1920×1200 with the same ultra presets:
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter HD on the Serious 3 engine is quite demanding and yet all of our top configurations play it satisfactorily using the game’s built-in “ultra” presets. Although the HD 5870 trades blows with the stock GTX 480, the stock GTX 580 simply blasts past them both. However, even the HD 6870 puts in a good showing and is sufficient to play this game at 1920×1200.
Amazing review guys, I wonder if I can evolve my GTX 480 to 580 using EVGA’s RMA process. I need maor powah!!!
I think this is the best GTX 580 review I’ve seen on the net! And I’ve read almost all of them. Thanks for testing so many game titles and especially DX9 titles. I still run XP, so it’s important for me to see how the card did in them. Most reviews only have one or two DX9 games tested, some don’t have any. After reading this review I made up my mind about getting this card. Thanks!
Oh, and I forgot to ask: please use same titles when reviewing the upcoming HD 6970. Thanks!
I had 3 580 GTX’s in my system using a Core i7 980x, and it crashed during minesweeper.
How did it go with the step up program?
Thanks for the kind words. And I generally use the same titles and same settings for the high end cards.
I will be very busy for the next few days.
A very comprehensive review.
It seems that Nvidia has upped its game. I’ve always preferred single GPU solutions over SLI or Crossfire, as have many others, although right now this is out of my budget. It exceeded expectations – cooler and faster. I wonder what AMD’s response will be like.