Even though NVIDIA hasn't officially announced the GeForce GTX 580, it's expected to arrive in the next week or so. Coincidently, the company has been showing off some details about an 'unnamed' GPU that it claims will be the fastest on the planet.
Talking to attendees at PDXLAN over the weekend, the company's Director of Technical Marketing, Tom Petersen, carefully avoided naming or announcing any new products, but went into some details on unreleased NVIDIA technology. The new GPU - which is set to arrive "very, very soon" - will be the "fastest DirectX11 GPU on the planet" and was shown tearing through a demo of the upcoming game Call of Duty: Black Ops.
What was more interesting, though, was the new cooling tech that will go into the card. The GeForce-maker has built up a bit of a reputation lately for making cards that generate a lot of heat and require fairly substantial cooling solutions to keep everything running. While this new GPU isn't expected to run cool, the heat-sink has been considerably upgraded to better manage the thermals.
The cooler will use a vapour chamber design that relies on the same principles as heat-pipes but applied to each of the cooling-fins. This is a much more efficient design that should make heat transfer more effective and, combined with a new fan profile, will lead to a cooler, quieter graphics-card. In fact, the manufacturer claimed that the card will be substantially quieter than the GTX 480 and the GTX 285.
As has become the norm for an NVIDIA tech demo, there was also a big emphasis on tessellation, with a few scenes showing off some pretty impressive procedurally generated content.
There was clearly some powerful hardware on display, but it remains to be seen whether or not the company can successfully create a cool, quiet and powerful video-card. Apparently, we'll get to find out for ourselves very, very soon.
