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NVIDIA's New Flagship GeForce GTX 580 Tested
MojoKid writes "Even before NVIDIA's GF100 GPU-based GeForce GTX 480 officially arrived, there were a myriad of reports claiming the cards would be hot, loud, and consume a lot of power. Of course, NVIDIA knew that well before the first card ever hit store shelves, so the company got to work on a revision of the GPU and card itself that would attempt to address these concerns. Today the company has launched the GeForce GTX 580 and as its name suggests, it's a next-gen product, but the GF110 GPU powering the card is largely unchanged from the GF100 in terms of its features. However, refinements have been made to the design and manufacturing of the chip, along with its cooling solution and PCB. In short, the GeForce GTX 580 turned out to be the fastest, single-GPU on the market currently. It can put up in-game benchmark scores between 30% and 50% faster than AMD's current flagship single-GPU, the Radeon HD 5870. Take synthetic tests like Unigine into account and the GTX 580 can be up to twice as fast."
Does anyone assume that the synthetic benchmarks achieved by either AMD or NVIDIA are representative of anything more than these companies' efforts to tweak their driver sets against the pre-existing criteria for getting a "good score"?
Both companies I believe have been accused over the years of doing just that and pointing the finger at the other as taking part in shennaniganism"
I went to battle M.C. Escher, but drew a blank.
I don't think that they have much choice about "Ion 2" pretty much sucking.
With the prior generation of atoms, the usual pairing was Atom + fairly antiquated Intel chipset with GMA950 and a fairly high TDP. For just a little extra, you could pair the Atom with Nvidia's chipset instead, which had as good or better TDP and much better integrated graphics. Intel wasn't happy; but the end result was good.
With the newer generation, Intel brought most of the chipset functions onboard, and played hardball with licensing, so that "Ion 2" ended up consisting of, in essence, Nvidia's lowest-end discrete GPU added on to the system via the few PCIe lanes available. Unlike Ion, which was a genuine improvement in basically all respects other than OSS linux support, Ion2 meant higher TDP, more board space, and higher BOM.
Intel bears much of the blame for it; but Ion 2 is largely a dog, particularly when compared to the "CULV" options, which will get you a real(albeit low end) Core2 or i3 processor and a similar low end GPU for not much more than the Atom...