Today we are turning our clocks all of the manner back to November 2010 to revisit the as soon as mighty GeForce GTX 580, a card that marked the transition from 55nm to 40nm for Nvidia's high-stop GPUs and helped the corporation sweep its Fermi-based GeForce GTX 480 below the rug.

If you remember, the GTX 480 and 470 (GF100) released just eight months before the GTX 580 in March 2010, giving gamers an possibility to shop for a $500 pix card that would double as a George Foreman grill. With a TDP of 250 watts, the GTX 480 didn't raise too many eyebrows and round then AMD's tons smaller Radeon HD 5870 changed into rated at 228 watts at the same time as its twin-GPU 5970 smoked most electricity resources with its 294 watt rating.

Although each the Radeon HD 5870 and GeForce GTX 480 have been built on the equal 40nm production system, the GeForce became huge. Its die turned into over 50% large. Nvidia aimed to create a GPU that packed each robust gaming and sturdy compute performance, resulting in the GF100 die measuring an insane 529mm2.

This behemoth of a die caused troubles for TSMC's 40nm manner which changed into nonetheless maturing at the time, which resulted in bad yields and leaky transistors. For game enthusiasts, the GTX 480 turned into truly too warm to address -- you could not touch it even 10 minutes after shutting down -- and it was far from quiet as properly.

Fermi went down as certainly one of Nvidia's worst creations in history and at the time the organization knew it had a actual stinker on its hands so it went back to the drafting board and again later that year to relaunch Fermi as the GTX 580. By November, TSMC had ironed out the kinks for his or her 40nm system and we were given 7% extra cores in a barely smaller die. Of path, it wasn't simply TSMC that had time to paintings matters out, as Nvidia additionally fixed what turned into wrong with GF100 whilst it created GF110 (the Fermi refresh).

Based on our very own trying out from 2010, electricity intake became decreased with the aid of as a minimum five% and reference card load temperatures dropped 15%. Making those outcomes greater awesome, the GTX 580 turned into ~25% quicker than the 480.

That's a considerable overall performance raise in the identical release 12 months and at the identical manner, while additionally saving power. The GTX 480 clearly sucked. I did not adore it on arrival but it wasn't till the 580 got here along 8 months later that I understood simply how rubbish it without a doubt turned into. I concluded my GTX 580 insurance with the aid of pronouncing the following...

"The GeForce GTX 580 is definitely the fastest unmarried-GPU pictures card available nowadays, representing a better price than some other high-cease video card. However, it's now not the simplest choice for those looking to spend $500. Dual Radeon HD 6870s continue to be very attractive at just underneath $500 and supply extra overall performance than a unmarried GeForce GTX 580 in most titles. However, multi-GPU technology isn't always with out pitfalls, and given the choice we might constantly choose a unmarried high-end photos card.

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 580 can be the modern king of the hill, however this could all alternate next month whilst AMD launches their new Radeon HD 6900 series. AMD became at the beginning predicted to deliver its Cayman XT and Pro-primarily based Radeon HD 6970 and 6950 pictures cards someday throughout November, however they've postponed their arrival till mid-December for undisclosed reasons. If you do not mind preserving off a few brief weeks, the wait could be worth a few financial savings or potentially greater performance for the same bucks depending on what AMD has reserved for us."

For those of you thinking, the Radeon HD 6970 grew to become out to be a piece of a disappointment, falling nicely brief of the GTX 580 and as a end result became priced to compete with the GTX 570, permitting Nvidia to keep the overall performance crown with out dispute for the following few years. It might be exciting to see how the ones stack up nowadays, possibly it truly is something we can examine inside the future.

So, we've got installed that the GTX 580 became able to store face for Nvidia in 2010 and retain the performance crown for some years earlier than 28nm GPUs arrived in 2012, reigniting the photographs battle all over again. What we're looking to see now is simply how properly the tubby 520mm2 die performs today.

Can the GTX 580 and its 512 CUDA cores clocked at 772MHz deal with present day games? Sure, it has GDDR5 reminiscence on a instead huge 384-bit bus pumping out an impressive 192GB, however there may be best 1.5GB of it, at least on most models. There had been 3GB versions floating around, however maximum humans picked up the authentic 1.5GB version.

To see the way it handles I'm going to evaluate it with the Radeon HD 7950 at the side of the extra lately launched GeForce GTX 1050, 1050 Ti and Radeon RX 560. Let's check out those results earlier than taking a gander at a few actual gameplay.

Benchmarks

Battlefield 1, Dawn of War III, DiRT four, For Honor

First up we have the Battlefield 1 consequences the usage of the extremely excellent preset, which because it seems is a awful preference for the GTX 580 and its measly 1.5GB body buffer. Don't worry though, once we pass over all the graphs I'll display some gameplay overall performance the usage of greater agreeable settings. For now, we are able to see that the 580 surely is not reducing it right here and fails to deliver what I would call playable overall performance at a little over 30% slower than the Radeon HD 7950.

Next up we have Dawn of War III, which was examined the usage of the more suitable medium high-quality preset. Here we see an inexpensive 41fps on common, but again, the GTX 580 is haunted by way of that restricted VRAM buffer because the minimum frame rate drops right down to just 23fps. This meant stuttering was an problem.

Dirt 4 changed into additionally examined using the medium exceptional settings and here the enjoy changed into quite correct with the GTX 580, definitely playable and for the most element changed into very easy at 1080p.

Moving on we've got For Honor and here we found a broadly speaking playable revel in if that makes feel. At instances we dropped down below 30fps and this made gameplay especially extra uneven than it became on say the RX 560 or HD 7950. It's additionally thrilling to word that the GTX 1050 virtually obliterates 2010's flagship component.