Inno3D Geforce GTX580 Review

1. Introduction2. The Inno3D Geforce GTX5803. Testing Methodology4. Mid Sys: Unigine Heaven Benchmark5. Mid Sys: 3Dmark Vantage6. Mid Sys: 3dMark 117. Mid Sys: Stone Giant8. Mid Sys: TessMark9. Mid Sys: Mafia II10. Mid Sys: Resident Evil 511. Mid Sys: Far Cry 212. Mid Sys: Alien V Predator13. Mid Sys: Lost Planet 214. High Sys: Metro 203315. High Sys: Colin McRae Dirt 216. High Sys: STALKER: Clear Sky17. High Sys: Battlefield: Bad Company 218. Technical: Acoustics Performance19. Technical: Power Consumption20. Technical: Thermal Dynamics21. Closing Thoughts22. View All Pages

While sales in the high end market are only a small portion of revenue streams, both nVidia and AMD are keen to be seen to dominate. With the imminent release of AMD's 6900 Cayman cards we thought it was a good time to have a look at the performance of this card within several systems.

The GTX 580 is a 3 billion transistor design which demands significant power, although nVidia have made changes to the architecture to ensure that latencies and electrical leakages are reduced. The Geforce GTX580 has 512 cuda cores (an increase from 480 on the Geforce GTX480) and it also features 64 texture memory units and 48 ROP's via a 384 bit memory interface with 1.5GB of GDDR5 memory onboard.

Product	nVidia GTX 480	nVidia GTX 580
Shader Units	480	512
GPU	GF100	GF110
ROPs	48	48
Transistors	3200M	3000M
Memory Count	1536MB	1636MB
Memory Bus Width	384 bit	384 bit
Core Clock	700mhz	772mhz
Memory Clock	924 mhz	1002mhz

The Inno3D GTX580 arrives in a multicolored box with the name of the product clearly seen on the front.

The packaging contains a video converter, power adapter and literature on the product. Inno3D also include a trial for StarCraft 2 with a gaming mouse mat from iChill. A nice touch, and probably more useful than a game you already own.

The card sticker is a similar design to the box with a multicoloured paint stroke design accent at the top. When compared to the GTX480, there is extra physical space around the fan area. The card is incidentally a two slot design.

The card is supplied with two DVI ports and a mini HDMI port. Sadly, to use three monitors you need two cards, which is rather disappointing. The card requires an 8 pin and a 6 pin power connector. The card supports HDMI 1.3a which is compatible with Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 khz/ 24-bit. There is support for 3D via the HDMI 1.4 specification. You can also hook up to four GTX 580 cards in SLI for increased performance and higher image quality settings.

The card is disassembled in various stages, with the plastic surround being held together by several screws. Underneath is a large cooler which is locked into position from the rear like normal. The fan is a reference design unit which forces cool air sideways over the components and through the heatsink then out the rear … the base of the cooler is copper for improved cooling performance.

The card in its fully naked form – we do love a sexy, dark PCB.

For our testing today we have built two systems specifically to target two markets. While it would be easy for us to test solely at 2560×1600 we believe that a very small portion of the audience have a 30 inch screen.

System One today is a mid range enthusiast system with a Core i7 950 processor overclocked to 3.8ghz – a figure easily achievable by the majority of people reading this review. We are using a 24 inch Dell Ultrasharp U2410 screen with this system build. To many people this will be a high end system, but if you are interested in a GTX580, it can safely be considered ‘mid range'. We will compare the GTX580 against current and last generation mid range boards to document any improvements if you wanted to spend more money on a graphics card upgrade. These review pages are market with a ‘mid sys' in the header.

System Two is a high end enthusiast system with a Core i7 970 processor overclocked to 4.3ghz with liquid cooling. This is a system that not many people will be able to afford, but we need to make sure we cover the higher level audience who will be contemplating a purchase of this card. We are using a 30 inch Hazro Ultra Sharp HZ230Wi screen with this system build. We will compare the GTX580 against other high end boards in the current and last generation. These review pages are market with a ‘high sys' in the header.

System One (Mid Range Enthusiast System).

Validation available here

Processor: Core i7 950 @ 3.8ghz
Cooling: Thermaltake Frio
Motherboard: Asrock X58 Extreme6
Chassis: Antec Dark Fleet DF 85
Power Supply: Corsair AX850
Memory: Crucial Ballistix 6GB (2gbx3) @ 760 MHz (2:8) @ 8-8-8-24
Storage: OCZ Agility II @ WD 2TB HD (storage)
Monitor: Dell Ultrasharp U2410 Rev A00

System Two (High End Enthusiast System)

Validation available here

Processor: Core i7 970 @ 4.3ghz
Cooling: Coolit Vantage
Motherboard: MSI X58A-GD65 (MS-7522)
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10
Power Supply: Corsair Ax1200
Memory: 6GB GSkill Performance Gaming ram @ 902.9 MHz (2:10) @ 7-8-7-24
Storage: Kingston SSDNow V+ 512GB Gen 2 SSD (Storage) / Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (OS boot)
Monitor: Hazro Ultra Sharp HZ230Wi

Other graphics cards for comparisons:

Powercolor HD6870 PCS+ (940/1100)
eVGA GTX460 FTW
MSI GTX460 Talon
Nvidia GTX 480
Nvidia GTX470
AMD HD5970
AMD HD6870
AMD HD5870
eVGA GTX460 768MB SC
Nvidia GTX460 reference board (1gb)
AMD HD6850
XFX HD5830 XXX
nVidia GTS 450
AMD HD5770
XFX HD5750 XXX
AMD HD5750

Software:
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit

Unigine Heaven Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
Catalyst 10.10 Driver
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark
TessMark
Forceware 263.09 WHQL
Catalyst 10.10

Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Keithley Integra unit
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter

Games:
Resident Evil 5
Colin McRae Dirt 2
Lost Planet 2
Far Cry 2
STALKER: Clear Sky
Metro 2033
Alien V Predator
Mafia 2
BattleField: Bad Company

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests all games across five closely matched runs and average out the results to get an accurate median figure.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We test at 1080p so that all video cards can be compared throughout our reviews. Obviously driver updates might enhance performance slightly over time, but as a rule, its a useful way for us to present the findings.

Tessellation performance is stunningly good, and within this mid range system at 1080p resolution it is literally miles ahead of the other graphics cards.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7.  This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

3Dmark Vantage shows a significant performance boost, even within our ‘mid range' Core i7 950 overclocked system. Significant performance gains are to be gained from an ‘upgrade' purchase of the new nVidia solution.

3DMark 11 was just released as we were finalising this article, so we did not have time to run the benchmark across a wide variety of hardware in our labs. We wanted to include a result however for the GTX580 running on the Core i7 950 system. We have a few extra licenses of this and will be giving them away in a competition shortly so keep watching the Kitguru home page.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

Please note the program incorrectly reports the clock speed of the processor in the images above, it was running at 3.8ghz.

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.

At 1080p the card scored an average of 87 frames per second, which is basically more than double the frame rate the 6870 delivered when we last tested it at the same settings. Clearly this card is a tessellation powerhouse, without question.

TessMark, is small synthetic graphics benchmark focused on Tessellation performance of Direct3D 11 and OpenGL 4 capable cards.

Like Unigine Heaven, TessMark allows to select the level tessellation. The small difference is that TessMark proposes four differents levels:

• moderate
• normal
• extreme
• insane

Moderate and normal levels are levels we’ll find in real world applications like games. Extreme and insane levels are reserved for GPUs with much tessellation processing power. We tested the GTX580 with both ‘moderate' and ‘extreme' settings.

Again, much like the results we gained from Unigine Heaven Benchmark, these figures are astonishingly good.

Mafia II is a gritty drama which chronicles the rise of World War II veteran Vito Scaletta, the son of Sicilian immigrants. As the game progresses, Vito will join the Falcone Crime Family and become a made man. There are 15 chapters in the game, connected into one storyline.

We tested at 1080p with fullscreen: on, antialiasing:on , Anisotrophic filtering: 16x, Shadow Quality: High, Ambient Occlusion: on, Geometry Detail: High and APEX PhysX: off.

Mafia 2 can be a surprisingly demanding game, especially when fire and explosion pollute the screen. We noticed that the GTX580 was able to handle a much more dynamic environment while maintaining higher minimum frame rates.

Resident Evil 5, known in Japan as Biohazard 5, is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil survival horror series, and was released on March 5, 2009 in Japan and on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version of the game was released on September 15, 2009 in North America, September 17 in Japan and September 18 in Europe. Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they investigate a terrorist threat in Kijuju, a fictional town in Africa.

Within its first three weeks of release, the game sold over 2 million units worldwide and became the best-selling game of the franchise in the United Kingdom. As of December, 2009, Resident Evil 5 has sold 5.3 million copies worldwide since launch, becoming the best selling Resident Evil game ever made.

While we are being somewhat CPU limited here, the performance differences are clear to see, with a minimum frame rate almost the same as the average of an overclocked HD6870.

Far Cry 2 (commonly abbreviated as “FC2 or “fc2″) is an open-ended first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America and on October 23, 2008 in Europe and Australia. It was made available on Steam on October 22, 2008. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2.

Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, though the sequel has very few noticeable similarities to the original game. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay that allows the player greater freedom to explore different African landscapes such as deserts, jungles, and savannas. The game takes place in a modern-day East African nation in a state of anarchy and civil war. The player takes control of a mercenary on a lengthy journey to locate and assassinate “The Jackal,” a notorious arms dealer.

Far Cry 2 is still a popular game and the open world environment can be taxing on even the latest hardware available today.

Our settings: 1920×1200 (60Hz), D3D10, Fixed Time Step(No), Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(4x), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Optimal), Vegetation(High), Shading(High), Terrain(High), Geometry(High), Post FX(High), Texture(High), Shadow(High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High).

Again we are being CPU limited with this title, but the benefits are easily seen with the highest performance figures yet recorded at this resolution from a single GPU card.

Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today.

To test the cards we used a 1080p resolution with DX11, Texture Quality Very High, MSAA Samples 1, 16 af, ambient occulsion on, shadow complexity high, motion blur on. We use this with most of our graphics card testing so cards are comparible throughout reviews.

The DX11 Alien V Predator, runs incredibly smoothly on the GTX580 solution, and it leads this ‘mid range' pack by a considerable margin.

Lost Planet 2 is a third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the sequel to Lost Planet: Extreme Condition which is also made by Capcom, taking place ten years after the events of the first game, on the same fictional planet. The story takes place back on E.D.N. III 10 years after the events of the first game. The snow has melted to reveal jungles and more tropical areas that have taken the place of more frozen regions. The plot begins with Mercenaries fighting against Jungle Pirates.

After destroying a mine, the Mercenaries continue on to evacuate the area, in which a Category-G Akrid appears and attacks them. After being rescued, they find out their evacuation point (Where the Category-G appeared) was a set-up and no pick up team awaited them. Lost Planet 2 runs on the MT-Framework 2.0, an updated version of the engine used in several Capcom-developed games.

We are testing in DX11 mode with all settings on the highest. Direct X 11 features are on medium.

Lost Planet 2 in full DX11 mode places a high demand on partnering hardware, although looking at the GTX580 frame rate results you would be hard pressed to notice. Incredible results, yet again.

The makers of Metro 2033 – 4A Games was founded by people who split off from GSC Game World a year before the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, in particular Oles’ Shiskovtsov and Aleksandr Maksimchuk, the programmers who worked on the development of X-Ray engine used in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. The game utilizes multi-platform 4A Engine, running on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Microsoft Windows. There is some contention regarding whether the engine is based on the pre-release X-Ray engine (as claimed by Sergiy Grygorovych, the founder of GSC Game World, as well as users who have seen the 4A Engine SDK screenshots, citing visual similarities, shared resources, and technical evaluation of the pre-release 4A Engine demo conducted at the request of GSC Game World), or whether the engine is an original development (as claimed by 4A Games and Oles’ Shiskovtsov in particular, who claims it would have been impractical to retrofit the X-ray engine with console support). 4A Engine features Nvidia PhysX support, enhanced AI, and a console SDK for Xbox 360. The PC version includes exclusive features such as DirectX 11 support and has been described as “a love letter to PC gamers” because of the developers’ choice to “make the PC version [especially] phenomenal”.

We tested at 1920×1080 with settings on default ‘normal’

The GTX580 is basically the only card that we felt was playable at these specific settings. This is the first time we have been able to play Metro 2033 at this resolution without turning everything down to the minimum IQ settings.

Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (known as Dirt 2 outside Europe and stylised, DiRT) is a racing game released in September 2009, and is the sequel to Colin McRae: Dirt. This is the first game in the McRae series since McRae’s death in 2007. It was announced on 19 November 2008 and features Ken Block, Travis Pastrana, Tanner Foust, and Dave Mirra. The game includes many new race-events, including stadium events. Along with the player, an RV travels from one event to another, and serves as ‘headquarters’ for the player. It features a roster of contemporary off-road events, taking players to diverse and challenging real-world environments. The game takes place across four continents: Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. The game includes five different event types: Rally, Rallycross, ‘Trailblazer,’ ‘Land Rush’ and ‘Raid.’ The World Tour mode sees players competing in multi-car and solo races at new locations, and also includes a new multiplayer mode.

This engine support DX11 and was one of the integral releases for ATI when they launched the 5xxx series cards a while ago. Hardware tessellation is used on the crowd, as well as water and cloth objects. DirectCompute 11 accelerated high definition ambient occulsion is also integrated with full floating point high dynamic range lighting.

We are testing in full DX11 mode.

Fantastic performance again from the GTX580, only outpaced this time by the older, dual GPU HD5970 solution. All of these cards can handle the game at these settings, right down to the GTX470.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky is a very eerie game. The Zone is a huge abandoned territory, with twenty-year-old dilapidated buildings, overgrown with forests and anomalous vegetation. It is a territory with deserted surface and underground research facilities, neglected military bases and testing grounds for new technologies. The radioactive land is covered with sores of burned out soil, poisonous fogs, and deadly gravitational anomalies. It is a world of a terrible anthropogenic disaster, and in the center of this hell sit the remains of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

The in-game Zone is a reconstruction of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the 30-kilometer Exclusion Zone around it. Moving along the storyline, the player will visit such places as the Swamps, the Red Forest, the Limansk city and, of course, the sarcophagus of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Many in-game locations have real prototypes.

The GTX580 and AMD HD5970 are reasonably closely matched with the slight performance edge going to the nVidia solution. The GTX480 puts in a good showing , scoring just over 33 fps.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (also known as Bad Company 2 or BF: BC2) is a first-person shooter video game developed by the Swedish firm EA Digital Illusions CE and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 systems. It is a part of the Battlefield series and was released worldwide in March 2010.

The game is primarily a squad-level online first person shooter based in a contemporary modern warfare setting. Additionally, the game includes a single player campaign, where the player reassumes the role of Preston Marlowe, the protagonist of the original game. The game's Frostbite 1.5 engine allows for destructible environments, and multiplayer maps contain a wide selection of vehicles, aircraft and emplacements and allow for five different game modes.

We are testing in full Direct X 11 mode.

Another great result for the Nvidia GTX580, averaging 49fps at these high IQ settings. The HD5970 scores significantly more, but with two GPU's in action we would expect this engine to perform better on the AMD hardware.

Recently we have changed our method of measuring noise levels. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. We are using a heatpipe based passive power supply and an Intel SSD to keep noise levels to a minimum. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests. Ambient noise in the room is around 20-25dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

We load the card with FurMark.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

Noise levels are surprisingly good with the card not audible at idle over the ambient noise of an enthusiast system with a couple of high quality case fans. When loaded it reaches 39.7 dBa however when gaming it generally is closer to 36 dBa, not intrusive at all.

To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. The best way to get maximum load results is by using Furmark, and even though it is not indicative of a real world situation it shows the limits the card can theoretically demand. The ‘gaming’ results are measured when playing Crysis Warhead and is a more valuable result to take from this.

This article is also worth a read if you own one of these cards – GPUz can be used to disable power throttling.

Disabling the limiter with GPUz shows that the card can take a maximum of 318Watts when primed in Furmark, when the limiter is in place it peaks around 220watts.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 25c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.

Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic.

nVidia deserve a lot of credit for reducing the temperatures, generally when gaming we noticed peaks of high 60's which is fantastic. Furmark is not really indicative of a real world situation, but even under those synthetic conditions, the temperature peaked at 76c.

The INNO3D GTX580 is an extremely powerful card which will satisfy enthusiasts who game at 2560×1600 on a 30 inch screen. When compared to the GTX480, it is a significant and marked improvement. When you consider it can go head to head with AMD's last generation HD5970 powerhouse then you are beginning to see just far nVidia have moved in recent months.

Power consumption is very good, and while I appreciate that there are methods to remove certain limitations now via software, I really would err on the side of caution, which is not my usual stance I might add. This is why I didn't dedicate time in detailing a page overclocking, although for those interested I pushed the core to 840mhz and the memory to 1150mhz. The GTX580 balance of class leading power, low noise and tuned power consumption is a gamers wet dream, with the only downside being the price.

To be fair to nVidia the cost in the UK is around £420 which is fairly reasonable, especially considering the levels of performance this product is delivering to the consumer. AMD have a heck of a task ahead of them to outperform this hardware but we are sure they are up for the challenge. Whether it will happen this year is another question which we will hopefully be answering in the not too distant future.

This card is without a doubt the best graphics card that nVidia have released. We still have a soft spot for the GTX460, but as a showcase of engineering capability and single core GPU power then the GTX580 is pretty much in a class of its own.

Yoyotech have discounted this particular card to £380 inc vat which makes it a very tempting choice indeed.

KitGuru says: GTX580 = gamers wet dream. Not much more we can add to that.

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