The high end sector only drives a small portion of income for nVidia and AMD, however it is important to be seen as dominant in this sector as public perception and confidence can drive sales further down the range. The Asus GTX580 Direct CU II is a highly modified play on the nVidia GTX580 reference solution which looks on paper to be one of the finest graphics cards on the market.
We have looked at reference design GTX580's in the past and have been extremely impressed with nVidia's flagship graphics card. While the HD5970 is still the ultimate performance king, in fairness it is a dual GPU design.
The GTX580 is comprised of 3 billion transistors and it demands high levels of power, even though nVidia have made changes to the architecture to ensure that electrical leakages and latencies are reduced. The Geforce GTX580 has 512 cuda cores and also features 64 texture memory units and 48 ROP's via a 384 bit memory interface with 1.5GB of memory onboard.
Product | nVidia GTX 480 | Asus GTX 580 |
Shader Units | 480 | 512 |
GPU | GF100 | GF110 |
ROPs | 48 | 48 |
Transistors | 3200M | 3000M |
Memory Count | 1536MB | 1536MB |
Memory Bus Width | 384 bit | 384 bit |
Core Clock | 700mhz | 782mhz |
Memory Clock | 924 mhz | 1002mhz |