Introducing Nvidia’s GTX 580 – Fermi Improved!
Just Cause 2
Just Cause 2 is a 2010 sandbox-style action video game by Swedish developer Avalanche Studios and Eidos Interactive and is the sequel to the 2006 video game, Just Cause. Just Cause 2 employs the Avalanche Engine 2.0 which an updated version of the engine used in the original and there are impressive visuals as it is made just for DX10. It is set on the fictional tropical island of Panau in Southeast Asia. Rico Rodriguez returns as the protagonist who aims to overthrow the evil dictator “Baby” Panay and also to confront his former boss, rogue agent Tom Sheldon.
The game play is similar to that of its predecessor in that the player is free to roam the huge open world without a need to focus on the storyline. The Just Cause 2 AI has been rewritten to use a planning system which enables the in-game enemies to do more and there is also more vertical game play as well as a manual aiming system that allows the player to target enemy NPC’s specific limbs. Just Cause 2 also includes an adaptive difficulty system which scales as the player progresses. There are also new weapons in Just Cause 2 which include launching laser-controlled rockets as well as several new vehicles including a Boeing 737. Just Cause 2 now includes dual-grappling hooks which give players the ability to tether unlimited objects to each other including the tethering of enemies to vehicles and to each other which works very well as one of your goals is to cause maximum chaos. It is a lot of fun!
Here are the maximum settings available to a GeForce card; the bottom two, the Bokeh Filter and GPU water simulation, are unavailable to Radeons and they are left off on all runs to give solid apples-to-apples comparisons for all of our tested video cards and we used the Dark Tower benchmark built into the retail game.
First the benches at 2560×1600:
The HD 5870 trades blows with the stock GTX 480 but the GTX 580 is solidly faster than either of them. Now let’s look at the performance at 1920×1200:
The GTX 580 scores an impressive win over the reference GTX 480 although both Radeons deliver a playable experience at 1920×1200 with maxed out details and 8xAA. Overclocking either the GTX 580 (moderately) or the GTX 480 (highly) bring similar excellent scaling with core clockspeed increases.
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.