What Else Was Improved?

On top of the obvious performance improvements, NVIDIA also improved many other aspects of the GeForce GTX 580. First of all, they made it more efficient. That means doing more work while using fewer watts of power. In this chart, NVIDIA shows that the GeForce GTX 580 is about 25% more efficient than the GeForce GTX 480.

As a result of the improved efficiency, the GeForce GTX 580 actually uses slightly less power (244 W) than the GeForce GTX 480 (250 W), despite the larger number of cores and higher clock speeds. This also allowed NVIDIA to significantly reduce the noise level of the GeForce GTX 580's cooler.

Of course, the large reduction in noise level is not entirely due to the slightly lower power consumption. NVIDIA introduced a new cooler design in the GeForce GTX 580 with a custom-designed vapour chamber in the heatsink and a new adaptive GPU fan control.

Finally, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 sports new hardware monitoring controllers that not only monitors its power input in real time, it also dynamically adjusts the GeForce GTX 580's performance (and power consumption) depending on the load. It also ensures that the GPU thermal output and power consumption is kept within specifications.

In short, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 is not just a higher-clocked version of the GeForce GTX 480. However, most of the improvements are due to improvements in the new GPU, while the other improvements are really evolutionary in nature. Certainly, there is nothing we see that can really justify the spawning of a new NVIDIA GeForce series.

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