GeForce GTX 580 hailed as 'world's fastest' GPU

by Steven Mostyn - Nov 9 2010, 14:59

If you’re looking to upgrade the graphics performance of your gaming rig—and there’s $500 USD burning a hole in your pocket—you’re only a single purchase away from enjoying the thrill of the GeForce GTX 580, which is described as “the world’s fastest DX11 GPU” by NVIDIA.

Built on the same Fermi architecture as the GTX 480, the sexy new GTX 580 arrives with 40nm manufacturing and boasts clock speeds of 772MHz, a shade clock pushing 1.544GHz and 1.5GBs of GDDR5 memory clocked at 4.008GHz.

By way of comparison, NVIDIA’s preceding GeForce GTX 480, which launched earlier in 2010, offered up a clock speed of 700MHz, a shade clock of 1.401GHz, and GDDR5 memory of 3.696GHz—so, improvements all round really.

Other contributing aspects packed into the GTX 580 include 512 processing cores, 16 PolyMorph engines, support for DX11, the ability to shift two billion triangles per second, quiet performance via a new vapor chamber thermal solution, along with support for PhysX, SLI, CUDA and NVIDIA 3D Vision.

“For the most recent games that feature tessellation—the key feature of DX11—the 512-core GeForce GTX 580 is up to 160 times faster than the closest competitive product,” outlines NVIDIA, “Even in previous-generation DX9 and DX10 games, the GeForce GTX is faster by up to 62 percent, including the blockbuster PC title StarCraft II.”

According to NVIDIA’s official pricing (SEP), it’s willing to part with the GeForce GTX 580 for $499 USD. Interested? Or would you prefer to wait awhile for AMD’s next instalment in the Radeon line?

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