Nvidia today officially took the wraps off its latest premium graphics card, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 580, claiming that it is "the world's fastest DirectX 11 GPU."
The GTX 580 has been reengineered from the transistor-level up to deliver increased power efficiency and performance over previous generation products, according to Nvidia.
Different from its previous generation, Nvidia's new offering runs quieter with its innovative vapor chamber thermal design. The combination of the new vapor chamber thermal solution and new architectural enhancements make the GTX 580 the fastest and quietest GPU in its class, delivering an increase of up to 35 percent in performance per watt, and performance that is up to 30 percent faster than the original GeForce GTX 480.
The card also supports NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround, 3D Vision, PhysX , and 3-way SLI for extreme DirectX 11 gaming.
The card is based on Nvidia's Fermi 40nm GF110, which packs around 3 billion transistors in 529 sqm chip. It comes with 512 CUDA cores (32 CUDA cores per streaming multiprocessor) and many improvements of Fermi architecture, including new high-speed 32x anti-aliasing for keeping the rough edges smooth.
The successor to the GTX 480 is faster, more efficient and quieter. It has been designed for performance/watt (re-engineeres from transistor level, evaluation of every block of the GPU, new transistors) and promises to offer exceptional geometric realism (2 billion triangles/sec). Nvidia has added more functional units for tessellation, shading and texturing and has improved timing for faster core and memory clocks. Specifically, the GTX 580 has 512 CUDA cores, with a Graphics clock / Processor clock of 772 / 1544 MHz, 1.5GB / 384-bit GDDR5 onboard and a memory speed of 4.0 Gbps.
For the most recent games that feature tessellation -- the key feature of DX11 -- Nvidia claims that 512-core GeForce GTX 580 is up to 160 percent fasterthan the closest competitive product. Even in previous-generation DX9 and DX10 games, the GeForce GTX 580 is faster by up to 62 percent, including in the blockbuster PC title StarCraft II.
The card is powered by 6-pin + 8-pin connectors, it has a maximum power draw of 244W and around 32W for idle and also comes with 2 x DL-DVI and mini-HDMI outputs with 7.1 channel audio to fulfill users? quest of high definition audio and video.
The Nvidia GTX 580 is available today worldwide from Nvidia's add-in card partners (ASL, ASUS, Colorful, ECS, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision 3D, Jetway, Leadtek, MSI, Palit, Point of View, PNY, Sparkle, Zotac and others) for $499 +VAT (?479 Euro, 399 GBP).
Source: CDRINFO
