nVidia GeForce GTX 580: The Fastest GPU Money Can Buy
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Let's take a look at the specs for the new graphics card, matched against nVidia's previous flagship graphics card and against AMD's fastest two competing cards. The Radeon HD 5870, now a year old, is still the fastest AMD-based graphics card equipped with a single GPU. Though the Radeon HD 5970 is the fastest single graphics card from the AMD camp, it is essentially two 5870 graphics cards on the same board; call it "CrossFire on a stick." This design yields high performance, but the HD 5970 is quite expensive in addition to being big, heavy, and hot.
The GeForce GTX 580 is very much like the GTX 480. The 480 had one of the GF100's 16 shader modules disabled, which effectively removed 32 of the shader units (nVidia calls them CUDA cores), four of the texture processing units, and one of the geometry processing engines. The new GF110 chip in the GTX 580 is nearly the same, but this time nVidia fully enables all of the chip's functional units. Note the discrepancy in number of shader units between the AMD and nVidia cards in the chart above; this reflects the fact that the numbers are not directly comparable. Due to the different ways in which the nVidia and AMD chips are designed, a single shader unit in nVidia's chip can do more work than one in AMD's chip. It is also larger, which explains why there aren't as many of them in the GPU.
Don't miss our review of the nVidia GeForce GTX 580.
Next: GF100 Unleashed
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