GeForce GTX 580: 3D Vision Performance

Conclusions

Sure, 3D Vision graphics look nice, but the 3D effects processing multiplies the workload of the graphics card by nearly twofold. For now, we can forget about anti-aliasing, because the 3D Vision feature alone already slows the game down significantly, not matter what type of GeForce you own. Even with NVIDIA’s current flagship monster, the GTX 580, we still noticed a huge drop in performance. In order to obtain a reasonable frame rate, we had to lower the resolution from 1920×1080 to 1280×720 in some games. We will continue our conclusions in three separate sections, each discussing the final thoughts on the GTX 580, GTX 480 and GTX 460 SLI.

GeForce GTX 580 1536 MB

NVIDIA’s latest flagship has proven itself in the ever-more challenging computer games battleground. Armed with 512 shader processors (CUDA cores), it had not trouble rendering all the 3D Vision effects in all our test softwares. Metro 2033, however, is one exception. Even the mighty GTX 580 could only spew out 15 FPS in this game, when we set the resolution to 1920×1080. By lowering the display to 1280×720, the card struggled to produce around 30 frames per second. We noted an average performance drop of 50% with 3D Vision enabled, except in Resident Evil 5 where the frame rate plummeted to just around 50 FPS from a hundred and fifty.

GeForce GTX 480 1536 MB

Based on the older GF100 chip, the GeForce GTX 480 is nonetheless powerful enough to run games with 3D Vision enabled, while still maintaining a reasonable amount of frames per second. In all, the GTX 480 is 10-20 percent slower compared to the GF110-based Geforce GTX 580. However, due to the excessive heat generated by this graphics card, the GTX 580 would be the wiser choice, if you have the money that is.

GeForce GTX 460 1GB SLI

The crowd’s favorite, GeForce GTX 460 1GB, has the most appealing price: performance ratio. By combining two GeForce GTX 460s in SLI, you will have graphics processing power that could even rival GTX 580’s. According to our test, in some of the games, the GTX 460 duet outperformed the GTX 580, while, in some others, GTX 580 took the lead. For our testing purpose, we used two MSI GTX 460 Hawk graphics cards, downclocked to meet the standard reference specification of a 1 GB GeForce GTX 460.

Finally, we can safely conclude that, in order to get a reasonable 3D Vision performance, it’s best to go with either a single GTX 580 or dual GTX 460 1 GB. The latter is a more cost-efficient solution, which will save you around US$ 100 compared to if you decide to choose a single, high-end card. With two GeForce cards in SLI, you can also hook up three monitors and enjoy the 3D Vision Surround experience.

There are, however, some drawbacks from using SLI. First of all, not all games have multi-GPU processing support that allows SLI to function properly, and you also need to have necessary support from your system. Secondly, you will have a limited frame buffer since your system will only utilize the memory on one of the cards. In our case with the two GTX 460s, we end up with just 1 GB of VRAM. Memory requirement scales up as graphics resolution and detail increase, when the system runs out of memory space to store all the graphics data, problems will occur. Our GTX 460 duet was unable to run Metro 2033 and 3D Mark Vantage at 1920×1080 with 3D Vision enabled, due to the memory limitation. On the other hand, the GTX 480 and GTX 580, each with 1536 MB of on-board memory, were able to finish the benchmarks under the same setting.