NVIDIA today confirmed its second-ever GeForce 500 series chipset video card. The GTX 570 has the exact same 480 cores as the old GTX 480 but, through the refined architecture, runs at a higher 732MHz main clock speed, 1.46GHz clock for each core and a 1.9GHz memory clock. It uses a narrower 320-bit memory interface (down from 384 bits) but, due to the combined improvements, has a higher texture fill rate bumped up from 42 billion to 43.9 billion pixels per second.
Th card has hardware tessellation units gives it as much as a 128 percent boost in DirectX 11-capable games like HAWX 2 due to the lack of tessellation support in AMD’s Radeon HD 5870 graphics, but performance in games without hardware tessellation is still up to 30 percent faster in StarCraft II. Separate tests from Anandtech show the gap narrowing, however.
Common NVIDIA features are there as well, such as 3DTV Play, 3D Vision Surround and SLI multi-card setups; it supports OpenGL 4.1 as well as general-purpose computing tasks like CUDA and OpenCL. Reference boards have dual dual-link DVI ports and HDMI out with audio passthrough.
Boards are available today from ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI and other third parties. Prices are significantly higher than the $250 Radeon HD 5870, at $350.
