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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 in 2025: Nostalgia or Practicality?

An analysis of an outdated legend for modern users

1. Architecture and Key Features: The Legacy of Fermi

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570, released in 2010, became part of the Fermi architecture lineup. It was the company’s response to gamers' demands for high performance in early DirectX 11 games. The manufacturing process is 40 nm, which seems archaic by today’s standards (compared to 5-nm chips from the 2020s).

Key Features of Fermi:

- CUDA Cores: 480 cores, which was groundbreaking for its time.

- Technology Support: DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.1, PhysX.

- Lack of modern features: No RTX, DLSS, or FidelityFX — these technologies emerged years later. The GTX 570 is focused on classic rendering.

The Fermi architecture suffered from high heat generation but laid the foundation for future generations of GPUs.

2. Memory: Modest Resources for Modern Tasks

- Type and Volume: GDDR5 with 1280 MB — modest even for games in 2015, let alone 2025. Modern titles require at least 4–6 GB.

- Bus and Bandwidth: A 320-bit bus provides 152 GB/s. In comparison, even the budget GTX 1650 (2019) offers 128 GB/s but operates more efficiently due to optimizations.

- Impact on Performance: A lack of memory leads to frequent texture loading from RAM, slowing down games. In 2025, this is critical: for instance, in Cyberpunk 2077 (at low settings), the graphics card will struggle due to a lack of VRAM.

3. Gaming Performance: A Trip Back to the 2010s

The GTX 570 was designed for 1080p in the era of Crysis 2 and The Witcher 2. By 2025, its potential is limited:

- Old Titles: CS:GO — 80–100 FPS (low settings), GTA V — 30–40 FPS (medium settings).

- Modern Games: Even Fortnite in Performance mode will yield no more than 40–50 FPS on minimum settings.

- 4K?: Not feasible. The card does not support HDMI 2.1 or DisplayPort 1.4; the maximum output is 2560×1600 through Dual-Link DVI.

- Ray Tracing: Lacks hardware support.

Conclusion: The GTX 570 is suitable only for retro gaming or indie projects.

4. Professional Tasks: Increasingly Challenging

- CUDA: 480 cores is laughable compared to modern RTX 4090 (16,384 cores). For editing in DaVinci Resolve or Blender, it will suffice only for basic tasks.

- OpenCL: Supported, but the render speed is 10–15 times lower than that of a budget RTX 3050.

- Scientific Calculations: Low FP32 precision (1.3 TFLOPs) and the absence of Tensor Cores make this card useless for machine learning.

Advice: For AI or 3D modeling work, it’s better to get a GPU with support for CUDA 8.0+ and at least 8 GB of memory.

5. Power Consumption and Heat Output: A Fiery Dragon

- TDP: 219 watts — the same as the RTX 4060 (115 watts), but with half the performance.

- Cooling Recommendations: A case with 2–3 fans is essential. The reference cooler is noisy under load (up to 45 dB).

- Power Supply: A minimum of 550 watts with an 8-pin connector.

Problem: Older GPUs often suffer from dried thermal paste. When buying used, it’s worth replacing the thermal interface.

6. Comparison with Competitors: Past vs. Present

- Modern Analogues:

- NVIDIA GTX 1650 (4 GB GDDR6, 75W TDP) — twice as powerful, priced at $150–170.

- AMD Radeon RX 6400 (4 GB GDDR6, 53W TDP) — similar to the GTX 1650 but supports FSR.

- Competitors from 2011:

- AMD Radeon HD 6970 (2 GB GDDR5) — slightly weaker in DirectX 11, but better in OpenGL.

Conclusion: The GTX 570 falls behind even budget newcomers in 2025, but it may be of interest to collectors.

7. Practical Advice: Caution First

- Power Supply: 550 watts with overload protection (Corsair CX550, EVGA 500 BQ).

- Compatibility: PCIe 2.0 x16 is compatible with modern motherboards, but check the card's length (10.5 inches).

- Drivers: Official support has ceased. The last version is 472.12 (2021). Conflicts may arise with Windows 11.

Note: The card does not support UEFI Secure Boot — there may be issues when booting the operating system.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Low price on the second-hand market ($20–40).

- Suitable for older games and HTPCs (video playback up to 1080p).

- Easy to replace thermal paste and clean.

Cons:

- No support for modern APIs (DirectX 12 Ultimate, Vulkan 1.3).

- High power consumption.

- Limited memory capacity.

9. Final Conclusion: Who is the GTX 570 Relevant For?

This graphics card is an artifact of its era that, in 2025, will suit:

- Retro PC Enthusiasts: Building systems based on Core i7-2600K or Phenom II X6 processors.

- Owners of Old Projectors/Monitors: For outputting images via DVI or mini-HDMI.

- Educational Purposes: Studying Fermi architecture or basic CUDA principles.

Why not buy it for gaming? Even a budget Intel Arc A380 (2022) for $120 will deliver 3–4 times more FPS in modern titles with half the TDP.

The GTX 570 is a story that deserves respect, but it has no place in a gaming PC in 2025. Its time has passed, but legends never die.

Basic

Label Name

NVIDIA

Platform

Desktop

Launch Date

December 2010

Model Name

GeForce GTX 570

Generation

GeForce 500

Bus Interface

PCIe 2.0 x16

Transistors

3,000 million

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

40 nm

Architecture

Fermi 2.0

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

1280MB

Memory Type

GDDR5

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

320bit

Memory Clock

950MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

152.0 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

21.96 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

43.92 GTexel/s

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

175.7 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

1.433 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

SM Count

Multiple Streaming Processors (SPs), along with other resources, form a Streaming Multiprocessor (SM), which is also referred to as a GPU's major core. These additional resources include components such as warp schedulers, registers, and shared memory. The SM can be considered the heart of the GPU, similar to a CPU core, with registers and shared memory being scarce resources within the SM.

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

480

L1 Cache

64 KB (per SM)

L2 Cache

640KB

TDP

219W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

N/A

OpenCL Version

1.1

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 (11_0)

CUDA

2.0

Power Connectors

2x 6-pin

Shader Model

5.1

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Suggested PSU

550W

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

1.433 TFLOPS

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

Radeon R9 M380

1.567 +9.4%

Radeon R9 M470

1.505 +5%

GeForce GTX 570

1.433

Radeon 550X 640SP

1.398 -2.4%

Radeon Pro WX 4130 Mobile

1.375 -4%