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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."
Am I the only one not dumbfounded by how incredible these things are? And how much progress has been made with graphics cards and PC Gaming. You can get a graphics solution running Crysis at max settings at almost 60 fps for only $300 (GTX 460 SLI). With that, you can run every other game at max settings, 1900x1200, at like 100 FPS. I don't ever remember PC gaming giving this much bang-for-your-buck or making this much available.
I'm not knocking consoles, they have their places. But it just hurts to play any game at the low resolution of a console and its low graphics settings. And I find myself thinking Steam is even easier plug-and-play than the consoles are. And all the new advanced graphics features are in the new cards. I can't imagine the consoles ever catching up. And it wouldn't be economical for the console makers to do so. I think the future of gaming really may lie in the PC.
Just my opinion. Please, no flamewars here. I have both a PC and a 360 and I appreciate them both in different ways. I'm just floored at how far PC gaming have come in only 3 years.
P.S. I know the responses are coming, so I'll just put a disclaimer that I have my computer hooked up to my HDTV in my living room and yes I run most recent and current games at max or high graphics settings on an ancient 8800 GTS 512 with a Core 2 Duo and 2GB RAM.