Nvidia Makes the GTX 580 Official By 'Accident'

Just a few days ago we were reporting on a rumor that stated Nvidia is busy working on its next generation high-end GTX 580 graphics card and today this news has become official since Nvidia's very own 3D Vision requirements page mentioned this card briefly (before being pulled out).

This “leak” comes just a few days after AMD has released its second generation DirectX 11 HD 6850 and HD 6870 graphics cards, the latter being already reviewed over here at Softpedia to find that it brings a huge performance increase over the HD 5770 that is meant to replace, so this may as well be Nvidia's way of stealing some of AMD's spotlight.

The mention didn't confirm more then the existence of this board since there were no technical details to speak off, although rumors suggest this will actually be a full GF100 core with some improvements such as 128 texturing units and a wider 512-bit memory bus.

I said a full GF100 core cause Nvidia actually designed this GPU to come with 512 stream processing units, however, because of thermal and power constraints, the Santa Clara based company was forced to disable some of these in its current flagship, the GTX 480 coming with only 480 such units.

Reports also state, the GTX 580 will come to market in late November or early December, but don't mention if Nvidia will use a new manufacturing process for this core or if they have actually done anything in order to push power consumption and operating temperatures down.

And, since TSMC is pretty far from being ready to mass produce 28nm chips I am pretty sure the GTX 580 will be based on the same 40nm manufacturing process used by today's Fermi chips.

This, combined with the 512-bit memory bus and the 512 stream processors, will surely make the GTX 580 the most power hungry video card available out there so I am curious to know how exactly will Nvidia cope with the heat produced by this monster, since those 512SP were to much for the GTX 480 to handle.

All in all, I would have to say this is just Nvidia's way of bringing something to cater to its fanboy base, since AMD will soon release more powerful video cards, based on the Northern Islands GPU series, that will surely dethrone the GTX 480 as the single-GPU performance king. (via geeks3D)