The GF110 chip shares a lot of its roots with the GF100 core. The GPU still packs an impressive 3.2 billion transistors in a die seize 520mm squared. Its default internal configuration has been ported from GF100 in that the GPU features 512 CUDA cores or shader processors as we are more accustomed to. There are organised in a 4x16x32 block where 16 denotes the number of stream multi-processors (SM) and 32 being the number of cores on each SM. Each SM has its own L1 Cache and a common L2 Cache is shared by all 16. The GPU is still manufactured on the 40nm process.

With the GTX480, only 15 of the total 16 SM were enabled to give it 480 CUDA cores and consequently, it boasted 60 texture units. The GTX580 uses a fully-fledged GF110 GPU and thus retains all 16 SM with none being disabled. The result is 512 fully operational CUDA cores and since the number of texture units is based on the number of stream-multiprocessors, the GTX580 sports 64 units instead of the 60. The number of ROPs has remained the same at 48 and the L2 Cache is still 768 KB. In terms of shader and texturing power, having 512 CUDA cores boosts performance by 6.6% over 480 CUDA cores. Nvidia have gone further with the GTX580 though. Not only have they increased the clock speed on the GTX580 compared to the GTX480, but they have also employed the GF104’s superior texture filtering capabilities in their tweaked GF110 GPU. Improvements have also been done to the tessellation engine so the already very capable performance that is expectant of the Fermi architecture has gone a step further.


Making improvements to an already very good graphics card is never an easy proposition. Never being ones to stand still, ZOTAC have however done just that. Immediately apparent is the huge cooler ZOTAC have implemented which will hopefully do a much better job than the reference cooler in both temperature and acoustics tests. The graphics card, being an AMP2! Edition is also overclocked as you would expect with the VGA weighing in at an impressive 815MHz on the core and 4100MHz (effective) memory clockspeed.

High resolutions, especially when coupled with filters such as Anti-Aliasing, require huge amounts of memory bandwidth and with the average screen size being reported (by Steam) as 1920x1080 it is clear why cards with a 2GB framebuffer are rapidly becoming the norm. Adding huge amounts of memory though does not always solve this issue as the core architecture also needs to have the power to make use of the masses of bandwidth available. We will see later in the review whether the ZOTAC card has got the core power/memory bandwidth balanced later in the review although I fear even a massive 2560x1600 resolution won't be enough to fully saturate the 3GB framebuffer of the ZOTAC card.





Let's take a look at the card features...