Introducing Nvidia’s GTX 580 – Fermi Improved!
BattleForge
BattleForge is an online PC game developed by EA Phenomic and published by Electronic Arts. The full game was released in March 2009. BattleForge is a card-based RTS that revolves around acquiring and winning by means of micro-transactions for buying new cards. By May, 2009, BattleForge became a Play 4 Free game with fewer cards than the retail version. BattleForge supports Directx 11 with full support for hardware tesselation. It is very impressive visually and quite demanding on any system.
First we test with our cards at 2560×1600 using the BattleForge built-in benchmark with all of its settings completely maxed out and with 2xAA:
Now we test at 1920×1200 and with 4xAA.
The GTX 580 is again fastest in BattleForge followed by the reference GTX 480 and then by the HD 5870 and the HD 6870. The stock-clocked GTX 580 is surpassed by the highly overclocked Galaxy GTX 480 SOC although the overclocked GTX 580 is the fastest. We also note the performance hit that the GTX 480 and the GTX 580 take when enabling higher levels of anti-aliasing.
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.