The chaps over HardOCP have posted their evaluation of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580 video card today for your viewing pleasure. How well does the GTX 580 perform?

NVIDIA has made some very interesting claims about the new GeForce GTX 580. First, NVIDIA claims the GTX 580 is the fastest DX11 GPU on the planet. With a bold statement like that, NVIDIA had better hope it really is when gaming; not just commanding leads in canned benchmarks. We can say with the utmost certainty that our gaming has proven this claim to be correct. In all of our DX11 gaming, the GeForce GTX 580 came out on top, delivering the highest framerates, and the best gameplay experience. In F1 2010 the GTX 580 consistently had the highest framerates. In Civ5 the GeForce GTX 480 had a superior gameplay experience, and faster performance than both video cards. In Metro 2033 and BC2 this lead continued, and the GeForce GTX 580 offered higher performance.

Another claim was that the GeForce GTX 580 would be 20-30% faster than the GeForce GTX 480. We never saw a full 30% faster performance in real-world gaming, so if this does exist in some game, this would be the extreme. We did often experience a 20% performance improvement over the GeForce GTX 480; some games more, some games less. The kind of performance advantage you will see varies on the game as expected. We didn't see a clear pattern from this evaluation as to which API or what kind of game would allow more of a performance improvement. In fact, the game that seemed to provide us the most performance advantage over the GTX 480 was Medal of Honor, which is an Unreal 3 Engine DX9 game. Generally though you can expect approximately a 20% performance advantage on average when comparing GTX 580 to GTX 480 in actual gameplay. In comparison to the Radeon HD 5870, we were surprised as to how well the aging 5870 holds up against the GeForce GTX 480. In all games however, the GeForce GTX 580 surpassed the Radeon HD 5870. We experienced the GeForce GTX 580 to be about 30% better performing than the Radeon HD 5870 on average. Once again, Medal of Honor showed the greatest performance difference, with the GTX 580 being 42% faster than the Radeon HD 5870.

The GeForce GTX 580 is a huge success for NVIDIA. We are greatly impressed with this new Fermi GF110 GPU. The fact that NVIDIA was able to provide 20-30% more performance, with slightly less power utilization, and a quiet running video card compared to the GTX 480, demands kudos. We talk about efficiency often, and AMD has some of the most efficient GPUs on the planet. The GeForce GTX 580 from NVIDIA is also an efficient GPU. There is a tremendous amount of efficient performance in the GTX 580, and NVIDIA is able to keep that performance inside an acceptable power and noise envelope.

Another reviews can be found on PC Perspective, Overclockers Club, Legit Reviews, Bit-Tech, Benchmark Reviews and Hardware Heaven

There is no doubt that NVIDIA was late to the DX 11 party, allowing AMD to stack the deck against them. Here they are seven months later with their competition getting ready to drop yet another high end DX 11 card into the market. NVIDIA has struck first and set the benchmark to beat. They have done this in a convincing fashion with the GF 110 based GTX 580. This is the card we hoped the GTX 480 would have been when it was introduced. Through refinements to the Fermi architecture, NVIDIA has finally upped the ante in the video card wars. The architectural improvements come in the form of full speed FP-16 texture filtering and new tile formats for improved Z cull efficiency. The hardware was redesigned down to the transistor level for improved efficiency that allowed for increased clock speeds with lower power consumption. On top of that, the GTX 580 gets the full compliment of 512 CUDA cores (up from 480), an additional Streaming Multiprocessor and an extra Polymorph Engine. During the game testing, it was evident that there is nothing but a high-end dual GPU setup that can compete with it in heads-up fashion. In many of the games, the GTX 580 was even able to deliver performance higher than the reference based HD 5970. That is some serious firepower!

All this graphics firepower allows you to increase the eye candy in the games you play and to take advantage of NVIDIA's arsenal of technologies. Technologies such as: PhysX in titles like Mafia II, Batman Arkham Asylum and Metro 2033; the strength of its tessellation engines in games such as in Hawx 2; and then its parallel processing strengths in Just Cause 2 where CUDA is used to simulate realistic water. It does not stop there. NVIDIA's 3DVision system and Surround technology for a 3D Surround experience needs to be seen to be believed. The GTX 580, much like the GTX 480, is Tri-SLI capable for an immense increase in graphics horsepower. This should allow for excellent frame rates in resolutions up to 7680 x 1600. If that much power is not enough there is always the ability to overclock the GTX 580. I was concerned that the voltage monitoring and driver package would let the performance degrade when you start overclocking due to higher than expected power demands when increasing the voltage to the core. In our press briefing, I was told that would not be the case. So, as soon as utilities are available with the ability to increase the voltage on the core, we will take another stab at overclocking. When it came to this overclocking exercise, the amount of headroom left on this card was a meager 56Mhz on the core and 106Mhz on the memory. Not really what I was expecting after seeing the improvements in the overclocking ability of the GF 106 and GF 108 silicon but it's still something. Overclocking did allow for increased performance when push came to shove but at this level, it's just icing on the cake.

By using less power, NVIDIA went back to the drawing board for the cooling solution and decided on a more efficient Vapor Chamber heat sink assembly much like the one used by AMD on the HD 5970. This allowed the card to stay relatively cool under load while still keeping reasonable noise signatures. Under load, I saw 81 degrees Celsius when the card controlled the fan at stock speeds and a cool 59 degrees Celsius when overclocked and the fan speed was set to the maximum 85% ratio. This is a big improvement over the GTX 480. Pricing on a card of this caliber is going to run on the high end of the scale but when you buy a Ferrari you know it's going to cost you a few pennies. What you get with the GTX 580 is the 'Bionic Man' version of the GTX 480 that has been rebuilt to be stronger, faster, quieter and cooler running - that can play any game out there and defend its territory with impunity. With NVIDIA's second winner at the top end of the single GPU market, I can't wait to see what happens in the next few weeks. It's gonna be interesting.