Introducing Nvidia’s GTX 580 – Fermi Improved!
Heaven 2.0 Unigine
Finally we come to our last benchmark, Heaven 2.1, on the Unigine engine. It uses DX11 and heavy tessellation which will strain any graphics card. At least two DX11 games based on Unigine are expected to be released this year.
We use the setting for “extreme tessellation” and high shaders and we also set AF to 16x. We will tell you right now that this test chokes the GTX 580 at the highest settings and resolution so we do not run it at 2560×1600. Here is Heaven 2.1 benchmark with maxed settings, extreme tessellation and 2xAA at 1920×1200:
The extreme tessellation and 2xAA completely choke the Radeons. In this case again, we see that the Cypress architecture is bottlenecked by its tessellator as the lower-performing HD 6870 with a tweaked tessellator is faster than the generally faster HD 5870. We can hope that AMD’s soon-to-be-release Cayman architecture is improved further for tessellation over Barts and Cypress.
And now we test at 1920×1200:
This is a synthetic benchmark and we will withhold judgment until we play PC games using the Unigine engine. However, the GTX 580 again scores highest.
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.