PNY GTX 580 XLR8
GF110 Architecture
Overall, there’s nothing ground-breaking different between the GF100 (GTX 480) and GF110 (GTX 580) architecture, though there are a few changes. The CUDA cores have been bumped up to 512 and Texture Units have also increased slightly from 60 to 64. Polymorph Engines have increased to 16, along with higher core and memory clock speeds. Given these modest increases and nearly identical architecture, we’re a bit surprised this card isn’t the GTX 485 or GTX 490, but Nvidia doesn’t often follow conventional wisdom when designing or naming their models. In any event, the GTX 580 is upon us, promising improved power efficiency and temperatures.
Below is a chart that shows the significant differences in the current GeForce GTX lineup as things stand from Nvidia:
As you can see above, the GTX 580 is a modest bump up across the board from the 480. Our guess is this will translate into a modest increase in performance as well, nothing earth-shattering. We’ll see during our benchmarking tests shortly.
Let’s now take a closer look at today’s GeForce card, the PNY GTX 580 XLR8.