Slashdot Mirror
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."
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=1034
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/11/09/nvidia_geforce_gtx_580_video_card_review
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4008/nvidias-geforce-gtx-580
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1461/1/
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/19934
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2010/11/09/nvidia-geforce-gtx-580-review/1
I am very glad to see the performance crown handed back and forth.
Now if only this was happening in the CPU market...
August 29th, 1997. At that point we lost all communication with Skynet.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
In an absolute, architectural sense, essentially never. A screamingly fast vector processor isn't going to do much for all your x86 code, and never mind all the little housekeeping chores that the CPU does(most of the modern ones include the system RAM controller(s), do a lot of peripheral wrangling, may be the root of the PCIe bus, and so forth).
In a "designing your next gaming build" sense, they largely already have. Unless you are a money-is-no-object-e-penis-must-get-longer type gamer, you can generally get better bang for your buck by going with a cheaper CPU and spending the savings on a nicer graphics card. It depends on the game, and there are situations where a truly epic(2x or 3x of the top of the line GPU ganged together with SLI or crossfire) graphics system will be CPU bound without the best CPU available; but Joe Gamer is, most of the time, better off with a third tier CPU and a second tier GPU, or a 2nd tier CPU and a 1st tier GPU.
In smaller systems(where board footprint really counts) or in cheap systems(where package costs and board size really count) the integration of CPU and GPU into a single package proceed apace, with AMD rolling low-end ATI tech into certain of their newer parts, and Intel trying to make their GMA stuff suck less. The only real wild card is Nvidia: Unlike Intel or AMD, they have no x86 cores to speak of, on the other hand, their GPU-computing initiatives are arguably the most advanced, in terms of tool and driver maturity. The question is, will they eventually produce an Nvidia equivalent to AMD and Intel's CPU/GPU combo packages(perhaps by buying VIA, who has adequate-but-deeply-unexciting x86 assets; but utter shit GPUs), or will they persist purely as a maker of high end gaming GPUs and GPU-based compute cards?
Unless the heriditary line of the "PC" as we know it is wholly extinguished, there will always be an x86 CPU floating around somewhere in the block diagram(and, in other types of systems, likely an ARM CPU); but it is already the case that, for many applications, the CPU has gotten fast enough to hit diminishing returns for many applications, and the GPU(or just the embedded h.264 decoder) is where the action is.
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.
August 29th, 1997. At that point we lost all communication with Skynet.
And Michael Jackson turned 39.
Coincidence? You decide.
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...