580 Review

[Slytat]

Just ordered 2 EVGA SC'd

Hopefully they'll turn up tomorrow!

[Ancient76]

This is interesting:

On the graphics side however, NVIDIA has been hard at work. They did not port over GF104’s shader design, but they did port over GF104’s texture hardware. Previously with GF100, each unit could compute 1 texture address and fetch 4 32bit/INT8 texture samples per clock, 2 64bit/FP16 texture samples per clock, or 1 128bit/FP32 texture sample per clock. GF104’s texture units improved this to 4 samples/clock for 32bit and 64bit, and it’s these texture units that have been brought over for GF110. GF110 can now do 64bit/FP16 filtering at full speed versus half-speed on GF100, and this is the first of the two major steps NVIDIA took to increase GF110’s performance over GF100’s performance on a clock-for-clock basis.

Moving on, GF110’s second trick is brand-new to GF110, and it goes hand-in-hand with NVIDIA’s focus on tessellation: improved Z-culling. As a quick refresher, Z-culling is a method of improving GPU performance by throwing out pixels that will never be seen early in the rendering process. By comparing the depth and transparency of a new pixel to existing pixels in the Z-buffer, it’s possible to determine whether that pixel will be seen or not; pixels that fall behind other opaque objects are discarded rather than rendered any further, saving on compute and memory resources. GPUs have had this feature for ages, and after a spurt of development early last decade under branded names such as HyperZ (AMD) and Lightspeed Memory Architecture (NVIDIA), Z-culling hasn’t been promoted in great detail since then.

This is from anandtech.

I could get one through step-up for $16 USD including shipping, but I don't know if my $60 cooler will fit the 580 and I intend to get my monies worth out of it...think I'll sit this one out as the 480 keeps me plenty happy at 1680X1050.

Looking forward to you buyers impressions though - sweet looking card.

[AdamK47]

Originally Posted by AdamK47

I'll buy three.

And I did...

[Ninja Prime]

Originally Posted by AdamK47

And I did...

Thats it? Pfft weak.

paypalz. i need them.