nVidia GTX 580

NVIDIA countered with factory overclocked examples of the FERMI architecture equipped GTX 460 and GTX 470, which offers additional performance, making the match-up a bit closer than it originally was going to be. Now, just a week later, the overclocked cards from AMD and its partners are rolling out the doors. NVIDIA testing methods need to be adjusted to compensate for the image quality differences. NVIDIA GPUs provide higher image quality at default driver settings, which means comparative AMD vs. NVIDIA testing methods need to be adjusted to compensate for the image quality differences.

NVIDIA is also rushing their GTX580 card out the door, so expect that to be out by Christmas. We are hearing rumors that all the CUDA cores are being enabled now and that they cleaned up the original GF100 design by re-taping it and cleaning up the design a bit.

NVIDIA WHQL 263.09 drivers for GTX 580 posted up on EVGA.com and it appears that it works for NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 and the new GeForce GTX 460 SE. If you happen to have one of these cards be sure to check it out. Nvidia's just released GeForce GTS 450 sits at the opposite end of the spectrum at a place we like to call entry-level, albeit at the upper end. For around $130, the 450 brings DirectX 11 to the table. Nvidia on the other hand has both arbitrary release cycle and version numbers, plus most of their releases are actually non-WHQL beta drivers. They're no good if you try to recall wether 197.83 was better than 197.67 in this game .

NVIDIA testing methods need to be adjusted to compensate for the image quality differences. NVIDIA GPU anisotropic quality was also tested and more closely resembles the perfect ALU software-based filtering. Problems with AMD AF filtering are best seen when the textures are in motion, not in static AF tests, thus the ?texture movement? Nvidia for whatever reason released the 460 pretty much underclocked by default. Throw in a full 384 shader version (bet the GF104 yields are good enough to do it today, if they wanted) and clock it up to 750 or so by default and the game changes.

NVIDIA finally realised that their GPUs are crap and have dropped the prices for what, 30% already? Now they will drop another 50% (if this is true) but they still won't sell GPUs.