Gadgetory

welcome back to our unboxed for today's video we're turning the clock back way back to a time when GPUs were built using a 40 nanometer process and featured gddr5 memory just 1.5 gigabytes of gddr5 memory yeah anyway we're jumping back to 2010 to revisit the once-mighty GeForce GTX 580 now this isn't going to be a quick blast from the past type video where I compare the GTX 580 to some modern GPUs and a few games laughs but it's outdated design and then poke you in the eye before fading out to 20 seconds of cool barrel I'll still do those last two things but before we do I want to touch on some history show some benchmark graphs of course and then play a heap of games so strap yourselves in as we go for a gentle stroll down memory lane the GTX 580 is a venture began on November 9th 2010 that was the first of the GeForce 500 series to be released and for a good reason early that year in march and video released their fermi microarchitecture with the gtx 470 and 480 GPUs codenamed GF 100 this marked a transition from 55 nanometers down to 40 nanometers for Nvidia's high-end complex GPUs they did start playing around the 40 nanometer process back in late 2009 with the entry-level price such as the geforce g2 220 230 and 240 for example then four months later the mighty GTX 480 arrived in gamers got their chance to buy a $500 u.s. graphics card that doubled as a George Foreman grill with a TDP of 240 watts the GTX 480 didn't raise too many eyebrows AMD's much smaller Radeon HD 5870 for example that was rated for 228 watts while their Joule GPU monster the 5970 smoked most power supplies with its 294 watt rating although both the Radeon 58 70 and GeForce GTX 480 were built upon the same 40 nanometer manufacturing process the 480 was massive the DOE is over 50% larger Nvidia was striving to create a GPU that packed both strong gaming and strong computer and that resulted in the GF 100-day measuring and insane 529 millimeters squared this behemoth of a die caused problems 40 SMC's 40 nanometer process which was still maturing at the time and this resulted in poor yields and leaky transistors for gamers the GTX 480 was simply too hot to handle literally you couldn't touch it even after 10 minutes of shutting the PC down that thing was still searing hot and this also meant that it made more noise than an old vacuum cleaner the fermi based GF 100 architecture went down as one of Nvidia's worst creations in history and even at the time they knew it was a real stinker so they quickly got back to work and later that same year they did relaunch Fermi with the GTX 580 by November tsmc had ironed out the kinks for their 40 nanometer process and we got 7% more cos in a slightly smaller die of course it wasn't just tsmc that had time to work things out and video 2 went back to the drawing board and fixed what was wrong with the GF 100 is on when they created the new GF 110 otherwise known as the Fermi refresh based on my own testing done in 2010 I noted that power consumption was reduced by at least 5 percent and the low temperatures for the reference design card was 15 percent lower making those results even more impressive was the fact that across the dozen or so games tested the 580 was on average 25 percent faster than the 480 that's a significant performance uplift within the same year particularly given that they are both produced on the same manufacturing process and the 580 as I said also saved power so yeah it wasn't really until the 580 came along that we realised just how much the 480 sucked I didn't like the 480 when it was first released but yeah really wasn't until the 580 came along eight months later that I understood just how rubbish it really was I concluded my 580 coverage by saying the following the GeForce GTX 580 is unquestionably the fastest single GPU graphics card available today representing a better value than any other high-end video card however it's not the only option for those looking to spend $500 dual Radeon HD 6870 s remain very attractive it's just under $500 deliver more performance than a single GeForce GTX 580 in most titles however multi GPU technology isn't without its pitfalls and given the choice we will always opt for a single high-end graphics card in videos GeForce GTX 580 may be the current king of the hill but this could all change next month when AMD launches their new Radeon HD 6900 series aimed II was originally expected to deliver its came an XT and Pro based Radeon HD 6970 and 6950 graphics cards sometime during November but they have postponed their arrival until mid-december for undisclosed reasons if you don't mind holding off a few weeks the weight could be worth some savings or potentially more performance for the same dollars depending on what AMD has reserved for us now for those of you wondering the Radeon HD 6970 was a bit of a disappointment it fell short of the GTX 518 as a result was priced to compete with the GTX 570 this allowed him video to hold the performance crown without dispute for the next few years it could be interesting to see how those two stack up today perhaps that's something we can look into in a future video so we've established that the GeForce GTX 580 was able to save face from video in 2010 and retain the performance crown for a few more years before the 28 nanometer process arrived in 2012 reigniting the GPU wore once more what I want to know is how the tubby 520 millimeters squared die gets on today can the GTX 580 nits 512 CUDA cores locked at 772 megahertz handle today's games sure it does have gddr5 memory on a rather wide 384 bit wide bus pumping out an impressive 192 gigabytes per second but there's only one point 5 gigabytes of it at least for most models there were three gigabyte variants floating around but most people picked up the original 1.5 gigabyte version because that made the most sense at the time to see how it handles I'm going to compare it with the Radeon HD 7950 along with the more recently released geforce gtx 1050 1050 Ti and Radeon rx 560 so let's check out those results before taking a gander at some actual gameplay first up we have the battlefield 1 results using the ultra quality preset which as it turns out is a rather bad choice for the GTX 580 and its measly 1.5 gigabyte frame buffer don't worry though after we go over all the graphs I will show you some gameplay using some more agreeable settings for now though we can see that here for 580 simply isn't cutting it and fails to deliver what I would call playable performance as a result it was a little over 30% slower than the Radeon HD 7950 next up we have the dawn of war 3 results and this game was tested using the more appropriate medium quality preset here we see a reasonable 41 FPS on average began the GTX 580 is haunted by that limited vram buffer as the minimum frame rate dropped down to just 23 fps and this meant that stuttering was a bit of an issue dirt 4 was also tested using the medium quality settings and here the experience was quite good with the GTX 580 certainly playable and for the most part was very smooth at 1080p moving on we offer honor and here we found a mostly playable experience if that makes sense at times we did drop down below 30 fps and this did make the gameplay noticeably more choppy than it was say on the RX 560 or HD 7950 it's also interesting to note that the GTX 1050 absolutely obliterates 2010 s flagship part Ghost Recon wildlands isn't the most optimized game to be released in 2017 that's for sure putting it mildly let's say here the GTX 580 really struggled to provide playable performance using the lowest possible quality settings at 1080p and there were a number of graphical glitches as well like dirt 4 we see decent results when testing with Mass Effect Andromeda here the GTX 580 Mansion average of 49 FPS at 1080p using the medium quality preset the minimum or one percent low result of 44 FPS also meant that the gameplay was quite smooth performance in prey wasn't bad either though the texture quality was horrible as most of the textures simply didn't load so there was lots of blurry looking surfaces the minimum frame rate suffered a little bit because of this but overall the gameplay itself wasn't that bad it just looked quite poor visually the average in Resident Evil 7 was also quite good using the medium quality settings they'll again that limited frame buffer does kill performance at times and we did see dips down to 45 FPS which you know is a playable frame rate we understand but dropping from such a high average to that kind of low point does cause noticeable stuttering finally one test where the GeForce GTX 580 wins hands down is power consumption impressive stuff unfortunately for the old Fermi GPU lower is of course better here so while impressive its impressively bad by today's standards the GTX 1050 for example was often seen delivering over 30% more frames and here we see it did that while consuming over 50% less power or at least allowing the system to consume 50% less power ok so the performance seen in a number of those games wasn't particularly great now the quality settings though they weren't tuned to suit the GTX 580 those are simply the settings that we used previously to test modern low-end GPUs that have larger vram buffers and those results were recorded on our core i7 77 ok test system clocked at 4.9 gigahertz though the CPU used isn't really a big deal as none of the GPUs are limited by our modern quad-core processor that said though since I will be using more appropriate quality settings in the gameplay footage that you're about to see I've also downgraded to the core i3 8100 using ddr4 2,400 memory albeit 610 gigabytes of ddr4 memory right so I think that's pretty much everything let's move on to see what the GTX 580 can do in a few more modern games here's a look at our battlefield 1 runs using the medium quality preset at Tim ep after about 5 minutes of gameplay we saw an average of around 60 FPS though there were occasional dips down to 45 FPS as you'd expect the 1.5 gigabyte via Ram buffer was maxed out for the entire time and as a result we were eating into quite a bit of system memory but overall the results weren't too bad with a mechanical hard drive they frame dips and stuttering will likely be much worse so please note for testing that we were using the crucial MX 500s SD still overall the game looked good and played surprisingly well now we have some Call of Duty World War 2 results and here the game had to be turned down to the normal quality settings and this allowed for reasonably good performance the average framerate attorney peace in the mid 70s while we never dip below 60 FPS so again that's not bad and certainly very playable please note the VRAM usage is not displayed in quite a few of these tests I assume this is some kind of glitch with the GTX 580 and rivatuner Assassin's Creed origins had to be dialed down to the very low preset and here we see a number of graphical anomalies frame rates were also terrible at turn DP here we saw just 24 FPS on average with dips down to 18 fps I mean it is technically playable but by my standards I'm sure many of you yeah it's it's not playable don't fall still looks nice with the media and quality preset and it played superbly never dropping below 60 fps and like Call of Duty World War 2 frame rates often hovered above 70 FPS very armed usage is quite low in this game though again remember JUnit isn't displaying that information unfortunately towards the end of my test I swapped to the high quality preset which did improve visuals quite noticeably but as you'd expect it also reduced frame rates quite a participa that's at an average of 53 FPS with dips down to 48 fps was still very playable f1 2017 also ran quite nicely at ADP using the medium quality preset here the GTX 580 averaged 56 FPS and only dropped down to 46 fps salt was very playable and actually very enjoyable fortnight was also playable using the medium quality settings I saw an average of almost 70 FPS with dips down to 53 fps of course this is a particularly demanding game and VRAM usage only peaked just over 1.1 gigabytes so the RAM usage was quite low hell-blade played reasonably well here the GTX 580 almost averaged 60fps after a five-minute test and only dropped down to 51 FPS so again very playable under these conditions Mass Effect and Roman are played reasonably well with the medium quality preset enabled in my test run saw an average of 55 FPS with a minimum of 45 fps overwatch is the kinda game that really runs well on pretty much anything and this meant I was able to use the high quality settings and still enjoy over 60 FPS at all times at 1080p my 10 minute long tests are an average of 85 FPS for what was a smooth and experience pray is actually a very well optimized title but it does love to you is plenty of vram and this has caused some issues for the GTX 580 in the graph seen previously we did see a 1% lower result of just 39 fps and here we see a 42 FPS minimum which is a reasonable drop from the 56 fps seen on average still the game was playable and to be honest the frame rates aren't really the issue here rather it was the lack of textures that spoiled the experience and that is of course due to the fact that we can't fit the textures in that 1.5 gigabyte v round buffer of course I have tested with pub G and my test for this one ran for 10 minutes and in that time we saw almost 70 FPS on average with dips as low as 44 fps overall though the experience was certainly playable but I was forced down to the lowest possible quality things to achieve that performance finally for testing World of Tanks I used the built-in benchmark using the medium quality option which renders at 1080p here the GTX 580 averaged 142 fps by the end of the test and never dip below 82 fps so very playable performance in this title well there you have it eight years later the GeForce GTX 580 can still kind of almost play all the latest titles in fact the only real exception he was Assassin's Creed origins I was able to achieve smooth gameplay in pretty much every other title that we tested using you know low to medium type quality settings so for bargain shoppers is the GTX 580 worth buying well right now you can expect to pay anywhere from 30 to $60 us and it's a similar story here in Australia I've got one for $40 but they have been selling for as little as $30 ozzie considering the performance you get out of this card that actually seems pretty good for a 580 not a particularly bad option there that said for it to really make any kind of sense you do need to get it for about $30 and this is really because the GTX 680 s can be quite regularly had for $70 u.s. and well that's just a much better product the big issue for the GTX 580 other than the very limited one and a half gigabyte frame buffer is of course the power consumption it doubled the consumption of our core i3 8,100 system where you can figure with the gtx 1050 and as we noted it was quite often up to over 30% slower so for that factor alone I'd avoid the GTX 580 and look for something a little more fuel-efficient on that note I'm gonna wrap up this rather long video I assume it's been quite long I hope you enjoyed the revisit of the GTX 580 if you did help us out and hit the like button I'm your host Steve I'll catch you again next time