Final thoughts and rating
There's been a lot to get through on the previous 19 pages: let me summarise it for you. NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 580 graphics card comes to market as the best GPU that the company has ever produced. Better than incumbent GeForce GTX 480 by having a more-complete architecture allied to higher clocks, making it plain faster, NVIDIA rights pretty much everything that was wrong with the released-too-early GTX 480.GeForce GTX 580 is, on average, 15 per cent faster than GTX 480 across our eight games. Better still, it comes to retail with matching power-draw and a better cooler that is quantifiably quieter. We think that GeForce GTX 580 is absolutely what the high-end Fermi card, released in March 2010, should have been.
Now almost as quick as the twin-gun Radeon HD 5970 and miles ahead of the single-GPU Radeon HD 5870, the £399 asking price for GTX 580 is reasonable, once all the performance-enhancing factors have been factored in. Yes, you can gain similar performance with a £300-ish multi-GPU setup from both AMD and NVIDIA, bringing value into sharper focus, so folk who can't quite stretch to GTX 580 would be advised to go down this route.
The Good
Fastest single-GPU card on the planet
Better than GTX 480 in every way (bar price, of course)
Relatively quiet for a truly high-end GPU
Overclocks well for a range-topping model
The Bad
Not the fastest graphics card in the world
Still need two cards for 3D Vision Surround
Not solely NVIDIA's fault, but where are the triple-A games to justify investment?
HEXUS Rating
