Asus GTX580 Direct CU II Review – the ultimate 580?

Stone Giant is a benchmark tech demo that showcases and measures DirectX 11 performance using the BitSquid Engine. This is a very heavy tessellation dependant benchmark which runs very well on nVidia hardware.

nVidia solutions, unsurprisingly score the highest with the Stone Giant benchmark. This is not without some controversy however, in our recent interview with AMD guru Richard Huddy he said “With artificial tests like Stone Giant, which was paid for by nVidia, tessellation can be done down to the single pixel level. Even though that pixel can’t be broken away from the 3 other pixels in its quad. Doing additional processing for each pixel in a group of 4 and then throwing 75% of that work away is just sad”.”

Regardless, it is a popular benchmark and we felt it was worth an inclusion in our review today. We can see that nVidia hardware scores well, claiming the top positions, followed closely by the AMD HD6970. Those who pay attention will see that the all important minimum frame rates of the HD6970 is higher than the GTX460 card, meaning it is slightly smoother to the naked eye. Still, the higher end nVidia cards still utterly dominate this particular benchmark.

Become a Patron!