14 DAY TRIAL // During the short period of time that has passed since Nvidia's GTX 580 was first leaked we have brought you all sort of infos regarding this new top of the line graphics card offering including stock cooling pictures and the like, but today we are able to provide you with a launch date as well, rumors stating this GPU will arrive November 8.
This report comes thanks to VR-Zone as well as some of our own sources (close to the graphics card industry), a Chinese enthusiast forum also posting some benchmarks that compare the GeForce GTX 580 performance to that of the previous generation Nvidia flagship, the GTX 480.
According to these benchmarks the GTX 580 is 15% to 20% faster than the GTX 480, as we have previously stated in one of our earlier reports, the increase in performance coming thanks to the 128 TMU units packed by the GF110 core, texture fill rate being a pretty well known bottleneck of the GF100.
Compared to AMD's Radeon HD 5870 graphics card, the GTX 580 is up to 35% faster (3D Mark Vantage), although DirectX 10 benchmarks see this performance increase drop to as low as 5%.
Heavy tessellated benchmarks, such as Unigine Heaven and StoneGiant, can prove to be even twice as fast as on the HD 5870, confirming yet again the fact that Nvidia's tessellation engine is a lot more powerful than that of the Radeon GPUs.
According to these benchmarks, VR-Zone claims that the GTX 580 will still end up slower than AMD's Radeon HD 5970.
Moving on, the report also claims the GTX 580 will have a TDP of 244W, lower than the 250W of the GTX 480, although this number has to be taken with a huge grain of salt since the GTX 480 would go up to almost 300W power consumption in benchmarks like FurMark.
Fortunately, we don't have that much time to wait until we will get a definite answer to all these questions since, as stated a bit earlier, the GTX 580 is bound to get released November 8 (or 9, depending on where you live).