Hello Guru3d members, I have been debating for a while now if I should get a GTX 580. I love new technology that performs well, but don't we all ? :nerd: I would like to know if I should upgrade now or wait. I can see the performance of the GTX 580 and it is absolutely outstanding, but at the same time I am currently not experiencing any issues as far as low frame rates running all my games with my current ATI setup, every so often a driver issue may come up or crossfire profiles not being released in a timely manner, however sometimes I can find ways around it so I can still get good performance. Now I know that Nvidia most likely has there share of driver issues at some times, but I have not read in to this much . This is a big reason why I am posting about this because I do not want to upgrade to a powerful card only to be let down by driver support and SLI. Now I would like to mention certain benchmarks like Heaven v2.1 and extreme tessellation can be rather stressful for my ATI cards, which NVIDIA seems to excel in by a good margin. Seeing as the GTX 580 is a single gpu solution with so much power, upgrading to it will free me from multi gpu issues on the ATI side, albeit not very many issues at this time for me... I may lose some performance at first considering I will have one GTX 580 as apposed to the triple ATI card setup but in the future I would get another GTX 580 for SLI and that would absolutely walk over my current ATI setup as I would overclock the GTX 580's and by that time the drivers would have matured. I plan on keeping the NVIDIA card for a while If I do upgrade to the GTX 580 and then go SLI down the road. Should I be wary of issues that may come up, for instance does NVIDIA support the older generation cards well with driver updates and SLI "profiles"?. (I know on the Nvidia side it is not called SLI profiles it is something else but I am not sure, please inform me) Like I said I have never owned an NVIDIA graphics card so how are they treating users of the older generation setups with SLI or not ? Thank you for taking your time to read this, I hope I did not pass on my headache. Please do not flame each other and myself or derail the thread. uke2:
lol, personally, i would say to wait till later on next year and get a 7000 series or nvidia gtx 6x0 as they'll be on a 28nm shrink which would make them use less power, produce less heat, and pack more of a punch. going to a gtx580, the only benefit will be in games that support tessellation, and there arent that many going around. imo, its not really worth the upgrade unless you can recover most of the cost from selling your 5970+5850 setup.
Hi, Thanks for responding Sever. I agree, at this time there are not very many games that use extreme tessellation, or just regular tessellation for that matter. Honestly I do not think I could recover anywhere near the cost of my ATI cards, so I will probably just wait like you said for the 28nm shrink and see what is on the market at that time.
For the setup that you have i wouldnt bother unless you dont mind losing a fair bit of cash,performance wise you are better off sticking with what you have,wait for keplar or maxwell.
Dude I just left that TRI xfire setup not long ago and my 2 580's n sli seem to run about the same the 3 5870's. I have old benchmarks around here I can throw at you sometime but Im working on allot of stuff right now I dont have time.
I sold my GTX260 a couple of days ago and now I´m using a ATi2600Pro card........playing Fifa 11 in my XBOX and waiting for the GTX585 with 2gb of ram Let´s see what happen when Crysis 2 arrives. I´m planning to do a huge upgrade in a few months. SSD sata 3 hdd, Intel SB CPU and a 28nm video card (probably PCI-E 3.0). If I´m gonna spend 1,5k I want to make it future proof Just my 2cents. Alx PS. I apologize for my poor english, as always.
Well to be really blunt the lowered heat thing due to 28nm isn't really convincing. You have to remember the reason the early 400s where so hot was due to the large size of the 40 nm chip, it was much larger then atis 40 nm version. If I where you and where OK with the lowered 580 GTX performance levels and have the money/the will I would swap due to lowered fan noise and less driver issues. Both companys have their issues but overall Nvidia is smoother then AMD, and I'm saying this comming off a 4870x2 recently. Might be a good idea to hold out for some custom fan solutions to be released since that could further improve on fan noise and general cooling performance. 5970+5850 is a fine setup but I would imagine noisy aswell? Also it is never a bad idea to get newer tech if you can get a most of the money spent on the amd setup back on a sale. In short, 5970+5850>580 GTX but with a 580 GTX you have less fan noise and generally smoother drivers/driver package. a Single 580GTX once OCed is pritty brute aswell, for 1920x1200 gaming I can't imagine you would need much more then that.
Two choices here: 1. Do you want the fastest setup for SOME but NOT all games; or 2. Do you want a card that gives the best performance for ALL games even if it isn't the fastest? The erratic (IMO) performance of CrossFireX swayed me toward 2. personally after just seven months of using it. I was just sick to death of waiting months for AMD to add support for games I already had and in the meantime having to disable the second GPU to avoid negative scaling in many multiformat games. Then when AMD released a CAP update for a game it ended up disabling CFX anyway. Most of the time my second GPU wasn't even being used. Even when games supported CFX the scaling was often disappointing except for a handful of popular games. If money is no object, you love benchmarking or just can't bear the thought of not having the fastest PC available then, by all means, stick with CFX (and SLI). If you want to play games without worrying about driver updates then stick with the most powerful single GPU option. I know that's what I'll be doing from now on.