Don't haggle over the price of an egg
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Nvidia's GTX580 is a slightly upgraded GTX480
FOR £100 MORE DOSH the Nvidia GTX580 delivers only about 10 per cent more clock speed and memory performance than the GTX480 that was launched back in March.
Identical in almost every way on the data sheets, the GTX580 has 512 Cuda cores compared to the GTX480's 480, a processor clock speed of 1,544MHz compared to 1,401MHz and a faster memory clock due to higher memory bandwidth.
Beyond these key differences the data sheet only shows the GTX580 having OpenGL 4.1 support, FP16 texture filtering and "adaptive z cull", where the GTX480 doesn't. Oddly the feature specifications of the GTX480 show 3D surround sound support but the GTX580 doesn't, yet the new card's marketing blurb says it supports that.
The Green Goblin, however, sees it differently of course and claims, "performance that is up to 30 per cent faster than the original GeForce GTX 480... Even in previous-generation DX9 and DX10 games, the GeForce GTX 580 is faster by up to 62 per cent, including in the blockbuster PC title StarCraft II."
One clear difference is the GTX580's "vapour chamber thermal solution," a vapour phase change cooler that the GTX480 does not have.
The other clear difference is the price, of course, with scan.co.uk selling the GTX480 as low as £316 including VAT, while the GTX580 is up for £410. µ
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First the 6000 series from AMD is expected to be the same thing, a enhancement of the prior series. If you have been paying any attention from the last few series you would know and not try to spin it as something new and bad. I noticed you focused on increase in clock speed to inflate your entire argument in the beginning. If the clock speed dropped and the performance was good, I would not care. They did a redesign with the 460 and they are probably fiddling with that redesign.
If you wanna complain about it dont buy it. The 460s are a sweet spot and are pretty much under 200 bucks USD now.
In the discrete space Nvidia and ATI were constantly one uping each other. But Nvidia is now at a disadvantage as it is being pushed out of many of its other busnesses, be it dues to technological advancements in integrated systems on chips or not.
Moreover, they were hurt from the chip issues in the 200 series and they were hurting from trying to push out fermi when it required a smaller processes that TSMC was just not ready to produce.
The thing is that they are always taking the initiative. ATI/AMD plays it safe. When ATI had new features, it was a second thought and they did not push them. Sure ATI had tesselation engine in older cards, but it was underused if at all. Until Microsoft decided to use the technology in DX11 (most likely the cause of ATI having it in XBox dev sure). Nevertheless, for the most part, AMD lets Nvidia make the market changing moves (not saying it is a bad busness tactic) and once the water is frozen hard over AMD, all ready with their snow shoes, comes running over to stake a claim.
For those who really want Nvidia out or bitch about it should think what would happen if it was just Intel and AMD. There would be no real competition and the GPU market would come to a hult of inivation left for when they get around to it. Or an upstart would come along and shake up the market again...
Going by your logic ATI is dead since they had to be purchased by AMD in order to survive. So ATI is dead and Nvidia is dying, am I correct?
Actually, while Nvidia did hurt last year with the Fermi premature birth, going into the supercomputing market is hardly a move out of desperation. Compared to to regular sales, the supercomputing market has bigger margins (like the enterprise market) so it is a no brainer. It is called expansion and every business wants to do it. This is the main reason why AMD acquired ATI in the first place, to expand and diversify their market.
Which is why I always expect Nvidia to get acquired by Intel at some point.
Nvidia is not going down anytime soon though, they still have fighting left in them. If the positive reviews around the 580 turn into sales, they should be doing good for a while.
My, my, is there fanboi tension around here, or is there ?
Oh, and Fermi, mind giving us your Nvidia PR title ? For full disclosure purposes only, of course.
@Narrg
Your opinion does not equal fact, you might try to find some before you make childish pronouncements.
An opinion is like an a*s h*le every one has one but it's rare that it's interesting.
Obviously the writer of this article has done no research. All reviews of this product show a 15 to 30 percent increase in performance and much quieter performance than the GTX 480. In fact at extremely high resolutions this product can outperform the AMD 5970 in some (but not all) games. The Inquirer really needs to stop this fanboy ATI (now AMD) stuff and write real articles about NVIDIA products. However, for the AMD fanboys there is good news as AMD has cut the price of the 5970. So if you wanted one and couldn;t afford it now is your chance before stock runs out!
First, GTX580 is a new chip, with twice the texture units and 16 bit float texture filtering in addition to the 512 cores, higher clock speed and less current draw. These things can't magically appear in an old design.
I'm happy to see that NVIDIA is still innovating given that AMD has become Intel's toothless puppy... for a few bucks.
Don't get me started on Intel's efforts to push the monstrosity of x86 into the graphics space. I'm glad that Nvidia just laughed and kept innovating. x86 is the legacy which is most damaging to computing innovation today. Good riddance.
Only Nvidia's GPU is capable of general purpose computing, ATI/AMD is just a plain graphics chip capable of shading work but little else. Sniff, sniff... the not so subtle stink of x86 again, a solid conflict of interests.
But don't take my word for it - read what the supercomputing pros are saying:
"Support is currently limited to the Nvidia GPUs, including Tesla, because of their use of the Cuda software instruction set architecture. Platform Computing uses Nvidia's GPUs because they are Cuda-capable, and no other instruction set has the sufficient sophistication for workload deployment, Platform Computing said."
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/infrastructure/2010/11/09/supercomputer-software-firm-to-support-nvidia-gpus-40090805/
PS
I apologize for almost writing another article in this comment.
@rogerramjet: Sorry to break it to you, not like it needed to be because nVidia has been slumping for over 3 years. Why on Earth do you think they got into the GPU as a CPU market? It's because their sales were tanking. And for good reasons. They had to do something in order to stay afloat. They have no more good intellectual property since all they have is so old it's worthless. And, they haven't truly innovated anything new in years! Time to put down the nVidia coolaid and get a slap of reality. nVidia R.I.P.
You guys ought to read the article before you slate it.....it actually states that the clock speed is 10% higher not the performance....which is absolutely correct.
Still it is a little strange to refer to clock speed rather than performance when commenting on the value of the card as it is the latter which is important in the end.
Well, at least Charlie seemed to know a bit more before actually writing his "articles".
But, "faster memory clock due to higher memory bandwidth."? Really? Your true expertise is shining through.
From all the reviews I've around the web today the card is not half-bad. It is actually around 20% faster than the 480 in average. The 30% figure comes from canned tests apparently.
Sure, I am not sure it should have been branded "580", more like "485". Then again AMD new 6000 series so far have underperformed a bit, not sure they deserve the moniker either, even if the price is lower. I hope that will change with the new offerings.
I've been coming to this site for years because of the speed at which news hits here, usually first. I am however going to stop coming to this site because the accuracy of the reports on this site has gone straight down the drain. At this point in time it's like the authors on this site have become like Jeremy Clarkson in their remarks, except, they have no point AND the remarks they're making are usually based on complete lies.
Like other keen readers here have pointed out, the leaked tests of this card seem to show an increase that's usually 30% better than the current GTX480.
So if you're going to state that the new GTX580 delivers no more than a 10% performance increase - at least provide some sort of evidence to backup your claims (and a picture of you sucking your thumb doesn't count) because your current reporting style is really, really bad. I just hope no one actually paid you for this article.
"faster memory clock due to higher memory bandwidth."
You got that backwards... it has higher bandwidth due to the faster memory clock.
Look at the reviews and benchmarks.... the 580 is a good deal faster than the 480, sometimes as much as 30-40% in some games depending on the resolution. You can get a gigabyte gtx 580 RIGHT NOW for $507 from newegg. do the math.
the 580 rules
@Narg
Hmmm, They keep making the fastest graphics cards, and each time they get faster and run cooler, on an architecture that's only 9 months old.... are you a bit retarded or what?
Btw to the author, just where do you get your 10% performance increase from, a Christmas cracker joke. All the real tests are showing majority 30 to 35% increases in perf over a gtx480, amd cards including their unsophisticated dual processor whopper are blown into the weeds.
At this end of the market you have to be a bit more sophisticated with your mud slinging, as those of us willing to spend £400 on a gaming card tend not to be complete idiots you know; we do know how to compare what's on the market.
This is all nVidia does any more is up the speed and cores just slightly. No real innovation or change any more. They are just milking a cash cow out of unsuspecting customers who don't know a pixel from a texel.
The ATI 6850 is charged about 155 £.