The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 Tech Report

The new NVIDIA GF110 GPU is here! The first graphics card to use the improved version of the GF100 GPU is none other than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580, details of which we leaked days ago. As promised, we are revealing the complete details of NVIDIA's brand new graphics card today.

If you read our NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 Tech Report, you will remember that it was at the GeForce GTS 450 launch that NVIDIA started the rather bizarre scheme of giving their graphics cards pet names. The GeForce GTX 480 was "The Tank", while the GeForce GTX 460 was "The Hunter" and the GeForce GTS 450, "The Sniper". So what nickname did NVIDIA give the new GeForce GTX 580?

We would have considered suitably macho ones like "The Titan", or "The Behemoth". Okay, so those conjure up images of bulk and weight but hey, this card is no lightweight, is it? In any case, the new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 is still called "The Tank" but with "a weapons upgrade, with some shiny new armor to go along with it!" Whatever that means...

Perhaps what NVIDIA was trying to convey is that this is not just a higher-clocked version of the GeForce GTX 480. The new GF110 GPU may be based on the GF100 GPU, but NVIDIA has improved it in many ways, allowing it to deliver better performance while consuming less power. To better communicate how much effect the new architectural enhancements in the GF110 has on performance, take a look at this chart :

It appears that the architectural enhancements in the new NVIDIA GF110 improves performance by 7% on average. The rest of the GeForce GTX 580's performance is delivered by the 32 extra stream processors (cores) and the higher clock speeds. This is very similar to how Intel improved performance and overclockability of their D0 core (of the Intel Core i7 processor) just by tweaking the design.

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