Introducing Nvidia’s GTX 580 – Fermi Improved!
Mafia II
Mafia II is a third-person action-adventure video game which is the sequel to Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven. It is developed by 2K Czech and is published by 2K Games and was released last month. Mafia II is set from 1943 to 1951 in Empire Bay which is a fictional city based mostly on San Francisco and New York City along with some influences from Chicago and also Detroit.
Mafia II is a gritty drama which chronicles the rise of World War II veteran Vito Scaletta who joins the Falcone Crime Family and becomes a ‘made’ man. There are 15 chapters in the game and over two hours of game engine generated cutscenes.
Mafia II makes extensive use of Nvidia’s PhysX whose full effects are seen smoothly only by playing on a PhysX-enabled GeForce and preferably with a second video card dedicated to it. For this article, we used the full retail game with Mafia II‘s built-in benchmark with the highest settings for 1920×1200 and 1680×1050 – without PhysX except as noted – and this time we will reserve comment until after both charts. Playing at 2560×1600 is difficult without substantially lowering the settings that we love to test at.
Now at 1680×1050:
All of our video cards will give a satisfactory playing experience despite the benchmark’s suggestion that the framerates drop too low. However, enabling AA and high PhysX together will bring a GTX 580 to its knees even at 1920×1200 although medium PhysX settings are quite playable on a stock GTX 580 at 1680×1050 as you can see above. However, if you want to run Mafia II with AA and high PhysX settings on, consider getting a dedicated PhysX card.
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.