Introduction

During World War I, trench warfare was at a stalemate and presented a tactical conundrum that required the development of a very special weapon: the Battle Tank. This weapon was designed to overwhelm the opponent, bring heavy firepower and march straight onto no man’s land.  The tank is a beast bred from human ingenuity and engineering prowess.  In the arena of high end graphic cards, Nvidia similarly applied the same strategy in designing their flagship DirectX 11 GPU: the GTX 480. The GF100 cards were designed to fight in the tessellation front, armed with multiple dedicated engines, the opponent did not stand a chance and the DirectX 11 performance crown was won.  The GTX 480 was not without its faults however, as they were hot, loud and less efficient than their counterparts.

Even though the GTX 480 is currently at the top, Nvidia knows that the red camp is planning to launch a counter of their own soon, so work must be done to fix the issues on the GTX 480 and retain the top performance lead. Simply enabling all cores and praying for the best isn’t enough, so Nvidia redesigned the GF100 at the transistor level and worked on a much more efficient cooling solution. The result: GTX 580.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 is equipped with 512 CUDA cores, able to handle the most demanding DX11 titles at the highest resolutions. Nvidia has worked on the GTX 580’s weaknesses, addressing the problems of noise, high thermal output and high power consumption, while at the same time improving on the GTX 480’s performance. As with all Nvidia GeForce video cards, the GTX 580 is capable of extra features, like CUDA, PhysX and 3D Vision, which contribute greatly to enhancing the gameplay experience.