Inno3D GeForce GTX 580 OC review

Posted by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 11/28/2010 02:00 PM [ 0 comment(s) ]

The GF110 Graphics Processor

The GF110 Graphics Processor

After the GTX 480 release NVIDIA went back to the drawing board and introduced a new revision based on the GF100 ASIC, now labeled as the GF110.

With this release, NVIDIA now has a full range of products out on the market from top to bottom. All the new graphics adapters are of course DirectX 11 ready. With Windows 7 and Vista also being DX11 ready all we need are some games to take advantage of DirectCompute, multi-threading, hardware tessellation and new shader 5.0 extensions. DX11 is going to be good and once tessellation kicks into games, much better looking.

GeForce GTX 580 : 512 SP, 384-bit, 243W TDP
GeForce GTX 480 : 480 SP, 384-bit, 250W TDP
GeForce GTX 470 : 448 SP, 320-bit, 225W TDP

The GPU that empowers it all has small architectural changes, some stuff was stripped away and some additional functional units for tessellation, shading and texturing have been added. Make note that the GPU still is big, as the fabrication node is still 40nm. TSMC canceled the 32nm fab node preventing this chip from being smaller.

Both the GF100 and GF110 graphics processors have sixteen shader clusters embedded in them (called SMs). For the GeForce GTX 480, one such a cluster was disabled and on the GeForce GTX 470, two were actually disabled. The GTX 580 has the full 512 shader processors activated, meaning a notch more performance just based on that alone already. So that's 512 shader processors, 32 more than the GTX 480 had.

Finally, to find some additional performance, the card got clocked a chunk faster at 772 MHz as well, whereas the GeForce GTX 480 was clocked at 700 MHz.

	GeForce 9800 GTX	GeForce GTX 285	GeForce GTX 295	GeForce GTX 470	GeForce GTX 480	GeForce GTX 580
Stream (Shader) Processors	128	240	240 x2	448	480	512
Core Clock (MHz)	675	648	576	607	700	772
Shader Clock (MHz)	1675	1476	1242	1215	1400	1544
Memory Clock (effective MHz)	2200	2400	2000	3350	3700	4000
Memory amount	512 MB	1024 MB	1792 MB	1280	1536	1536
Memory Interface	256-bit	512-bit	448-bit x2	320-bit	384-bit	384-bit
Memory Type	gDDR2	gDDR3	gDDR3	gDDR5	gDDR5	gDDR5
HDCP	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Two Dual link DVI	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
HDMI	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes

For Fermi, NVIDIA made their memory controllers GDDR5 compatible, which was not the case on GT200 based GeForce GTX 260/275/285/295, hence their GDDR3 memory.

Memory wise NVIDIA has large expensive memory volumes due to their architecture, we pass 1 GB as standard these days for most of NVIDIA's series 400 and 500 graphics cards. Each memory partition utilizes one memory controller on the respective GPU, which will get 256MB of memory tied to it.

The GTX 470 has five memory controllers (5x256MB) = 1280 MB of GDDR5 memory
The GTX 480 has six memory controllers (6x256MB) = 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory
The GTX 580 has six memory controllers (6x256MB) = 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory

As you can understand, the massive memory partitions, bus-width and combination of GDDR5 memory (quad data rate) allow the GPU to work with a very high framebuffer bandwidth (effective). Let's put most of the data in a chart to get an idea and overview of changes:

Graphics card	GeForce GTX 470	GeForce GTX 480	GeForce GTX 580	Inno3D GTX 580 OC
Fabrication node	40nm	40nm	40nm	40nm
Shader processors	448	480	512	512
Streaming Multiprocessors (SM)	14	15	16	16
Texture Units	56	60	64	64
ROP units	40	48	48	48
Graphics Clock (Core)	607 MHz	700 MHz	772 MHz	820 MHz
Shader Processor Clock	1215 MHz	1401 MHz	1544 MHz	1640 MHz
Memory Clock / Data rate	837 MHz / 3348 MHz	924 MHz / 3696 MHz	1000 MHz / 4000 MHz	1050 MHZ / 4200 MHz
Graphics memory	1280 MB	1536 MB	1536 MB	1536 MB
Memory interface	320-bit	384-bit	384-bit	384-bit
Memory bandwidth	134 GB/s	177 GB/s	192 GB/s	200 GB/s
Power connectors	2x6-pin PEG	1x6-pin PEG, 1x8-pin PEG	1x6-pin PEG, 1x8-pin PEG	1x6-pin PEG,
Max board power (TDP)	215 Watts	250 Watts	244 Watts	260 Watts
Recommended Power supply	550 Watts	600 Watts	600 Watts	600 Watts
GPU Thermal Threshold	105 degrees C	105 degrees C	97 degrees C	97 degrees C

So we talked about the core clocks, specifications and memory partitions. Obviously there's a lot more to talk through. Now, at the end of the pipeline we run into the ROP (Raster Operation) engine and the GTX 580 again has 48 units for features like pixel blending and AA.

There's a total of 64 texture filtering units available for the GeForce GTX 580. The math is simple here, each SM has four texture units tied to it.

GeForce GTX 470 has 14 SMs X 4 Texture units = 56
GeForce GTX 480 has 15 SMs X 4 Texture units = 60
GeForce GTX 580 has 16 SMs X 4 Texture units = 64

Though still a 40nm based chip, the GF110 GPU comes with almost 3 billion transistors embedded into it. The TDP remains the same at roughly 240~250 Watts, while performance goes up ~20%.

TDP = Thermal Design Power. Roughly translated, when you stress everything on the graphics card 100%, your maximum power consumption is the TDP.

The GeForce GTX 580 comes with both a 6-pin and 8-pin power connector to get enough current and a little spare for overclocking. This boils down as: 8-pin PEG = 150W + 6-pin PEG = 75W + PCIe slot = 75W is 300W available (in theory).

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