NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 Video Card Review

Conclusions

The new GeForce GTX 580 is indeed the fastest NVIDIA GPU ever released. It was between 31% and 36% faster on 3DMark Vantage and between 5% and 20% faster on games than its predecessor, the GeForce GTX 480.

However, it may not the fastest video card around. The Radeon HD 5970 was up to 19% faster than the GeForce GTX 580 in most games and simulations we ran. The only two games where the GeForce GTX 580 was faster than the Radeon HD 5970 were Far Cry 2 (between 5% and 7%) and Lost Planet 2 (between 5% and 11%). Since the Radeon HD 5970 is cheaper than the new GeForce GTX 580, we believe
its competitor from AMD brings a better bang for the buck.

Another alternative if you have around USD 500 to spend on a video card is to buy two Radeon HD 6870 cards and connect them in CrossFireX. In our tests this configuration proved to be up to 31% faster (and a little bit cheaper) than a single GeForce GTX 580. The only exception was on Lost Planet 2, where the new NVIDIA video card was up to 8% faster. The advantage of this configuration is that you don’t need to buy the two video cards at the same time, so if money is short, you can buy one today and the second card when that extra money shows up.