NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 Review

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BattleField: Bad Company 2 (DX11)

BattleField: Bad Company 2 (DX11)

To benchmark BF: BC2 we used a five minute stretch of gameplay starting from the second checkpoint (after the helicopter takes off) of the second single player mission up until your battle with the tank commences. Framerates are recorded with FRAPS.


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DiRT 2 (DX11)

DiRT 2 (DX11)

Being one of the newest games on the market, DiRT 2 cuts an imposing figure in terms of image quality and effects fidelity. We find that to benchmark this game the in-game tool is by far the best option. However, due to small variances from one race to another, three benchmark runs are done instead of the normal two. It should also be mentioned that the demo version of the game was NOT used since after careful testing, the performance of the demo is not representative of the final product. DX11 was forced through the game’s config file. In addition, you will see that these scores do not line up with our older benchmarks at all. This is due to the fact that a patch was recently rolled out for the game which included performance optimizations in addition to new graphics options.

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Just Cause 2 (DX10)

Just Cause 2 (DX10)

Just Cause 2 has quickly become known as one of the best-looking games on the market and while it doesn’t include DX11 support, it uses the full stable of DX10 features to deliver a truly awe-inspiring visual experience. For this benchmark we used the car chase scene directly following the Casino Assault level. This scene includes perfectly scripted events, some of the most GPU-strenuous effects and lasts a little less than four minutes. We chose to not use the in-game benchmarking tool due to its inaccuracy when it comes to depicting actual gameplay performance.


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Lost Planet (DX11)

Lost Planet (DX11)

Lost Planet is a game that was originally released on consoles but in its port over to the PC, it gained some highly impressive DX11 features. For this benchmark, we forgo the two built-in tools and instead use a 2 minute gameplay sequence from the second level in the first chapter. The reason we use this level is because it makes use of three elements that are seen throughout the game world: jungles, water and open terrain.


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Metro 2033 (DX11)

Metro 2033 (DX11)

There has been a lot of buzz about Metro 2033 which has mostly centered on its amazing graphics coupled with absolutely brutal framerates on even the best GPUs on the market. For this test we use a walkthrough and combat scene from The Bridge level which starts at the beginning of the level and lasts for about 3 minutes of walking, running and combat. Famerates are measured with FRAPS and Advanced PhysX is turned off.


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StarCraft II (DX9)

StarCraft II (DX9)

In order to test StarCraft II performance we recorded a typical multiplayer battle on the Agria Valley map and used it as a replay in order to ensure every run was identical to one another. We used the last 3 minutes of the replay which includes the final assault on the enemy base. MSAA was applied in the NVIDIA and ATI control panels for certain tests.


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Unigine: Heaven v2.0 (DX11)

Unigine: Heaven v2.0 (DX11)

Unigine’s Heaven benchmark is currently the de-facto standard when it comes to simple, straightforward DX11 performance estimates. While it is considered a synthetic benchmark by many, it is important to remember that no less than four games based on this engine will be released within the next year or so. In this test we will be using a standard benchmark run with and without tessellation enabled at three resolutions,


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Unigine: Heaven - Normalized Tessellation Performance

Unigine: Heaven - Normalized Tessellation Performance

Supposedly, AMD’s new architecture makes use of increased tessellation efficiency when compared to the outgoing HD 5800 series cards. In this short section we will be taking the results from the Heaven benchmark tests on the previous page and plotting them on a comparative graph.

 

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8xMSAA Testing

8xMSAA Testing

In this section we take a number of games we have tested previously in this review and bring things to the next level by pushing the in-game MSAA up to 8x. All other methodologies remain the same.

BattleField: Bad Company 2 (DX11)

Note that 8x MSAA is enabled via the game’s config file for the NVIDIA cards since it is not a selectable option within the game menu

Dirt 2 (DX11)

Just Cause 2 (DX10)

 

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Folding @ Home Performance & Efficiency

GPGPU: Folding @ Home Performance & Power Consumption

One of the cornerstones of consumer GPGPU performance has always been a card’s ability to crunch numbers for distributed computing projects like Stanford’s Folding @ Home program.

In this test, we use the latest GPU3 client on a number of cards and let it run for 24 hours in order to get an approximate PPD average. Since this is the beta of GPU3, the quantity of projects is limited which helps give a slightly more accurate comparison between the GPUs. In order to monitor PPD, we used the HFM.net program. Note that results are based off of three Work Units with 611, 912 and 925 points.

Many in the folding community have surmised that many of the new GPU3 work units seem to benefit cards with higher clock speeds rather than core amounts. We see this here with the 925 and 912 point WUs where the GTX 580 is able to maintain a sizable lead over the GTX 480 but when the cores start counting in the 611 pointers, the GF110 starts pulling ahead even more. At times, we saw a 45 second Time per Frame from the new card which is quite simply incredible.

As GPU3 projects start moving out of the testing phase, we expect to see an increase in the folding performance of the higher-end Fermi cards but for the time being it seems like many of the GPU3 WUs will run just as well on higher clocked GF104-based cards.

Power consumption when folding with these two cards is like night and day. We will go into the reasoning behind this massive difference in the next section but let’s just say that due to the GTX 580’s ability to keep its temperatures under control, it consumes much less power than a GTX 480 when folding.


FOLDING UPDATE

With the release of some new Work Units this week which can be accessed by using the -advmethods flag, we have been asked to run a few of them through our GTX 580. The results are below. On average, we achieved ~16,500 PPD using these new units.