Review NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570: All the Features for Less

Conclusions

AMD had a good 6-months lead in DirectX 11 graphics market, during which NVIDIA could only do little to gain a foothold in the newly emerging high-end segment. The first graphics card based on the Fermi GPU, GTX 480, was a bit rushed although it did help NVIDIA reclaiming the graphics performance throne. The revised GF110 secures the advantage more firmly in NVIDIA’s hands. It’s possible that AMD decided to delay the launch of their next flagship, the HD 6890 series (Cayman) to improve its performance after learning of the GTX 500 series’ capabilities.

As for now, if there’s a best value award for high-end graphics card this end of the year, we would definitely vote for the GTX 570! For around US$ 349 (in online stores), you can get all the features and nearly as much performance as the current cream of the crop, GTX 580, itself priced at well above US$ 500. Also, as we can see from our test results, the GTX 570 successfully gets in the way of NVIDIA’s previous flagships, the GTX 480 and GTX 470 in all important aspects (performance, price, power consumption, and operating temperature). If NVIDIA doesn’t cut the price of those two cards, the GTX 570 will surely kill them off.

Things get terribly ironic for people who have acquired the now-dated GTX 480/ GTX 470. Only months old, they immediately got replaced by newer flagships. But that’s the way NVIDIA wants it to be. For sub-US$ 200 GTX 450/ 460 owners, upgrading to GTX 570 will bring you some substantial performance improvements. Soon enough, NVIDIA should begin releasing mainstream derivatives of GF110.

Compared to the slightly more expensive GTX 580, the GTX 570 has a better price/performance ratio. There’s a catch though: it’s 1280 MB frame buffer could be a limiting factor when you enable extra features such as the 3D Vision, NVIDIA Surround Gaming, or the combination of both since. Processing two sets of frames simultaneously at high resolutions (up to 5760×1080 for 3D Vision Surround) requires a tremendous amount of on-board memory. This is where the GTX 580’s more abundant VRAM will come in handy.

All in all, with the end-of the-year holiday season coming in fast, the GeForce GTX 570 makes for a nice addition in your high-end gaming shopping list. It’s very fast, and, more importantly, the price is right.