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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580: A Retrospective of a Legend in the Era of Modern GPUs (2025)

Introduction

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580, released in 2010, became a symbol of the high-performance GPU era of the early 2010s. In 2025, it is perceived as an artifact from the "golden age" of gaming technology. Despite its obsolescence, the GTX 580 continues to attract interest from enthusiasts and collectors. In this article, we will explore its features, performance, and place in the modern world.

1. Architecture and Key Features

Fermi Architecture: A Revolution of Its Time

The GTX 580 is based on the Fermi (GF110) architecture, which set new standards for parallel computing in 2010. The card is manufactured using a 40nm process technology (in comparison, modern GPUs use 4-5nm), which explains its high heat generation.

Unique Features: The Absence of Modern Technologies

The GTX 580 does not support ray tracing (RTX), DLSS, or FidelityFX—technologies that emerged 8-10 years later. However, its CUDA cores (512 in total) laid the groundwork for the development of GPU acceleration in professional tasks.

2. Memory: Modest, Yet Adequate for Its Time

Type and Size

The card is equipped with 1.5 GB of GDDR5 memory and a 384-bit memory interface. The bandwidth is 192.4 GB/s, which appears exceedingly modest in 2025 (modern RTX 40xx models achieve 1 TB/s).

Impact on Performance

Even in the years 2012-2015, 1.5 GB of VRAM became a bottleneck in games like GTA V and The Witcher 3. Today, this amount is inadequate for most projects—high-resolution textures simply cannot fit in memory.

3. Gaming Performance: Nostalgia for the Past

Average FPS in Retro Projects

In games from 2010-2013, the GTX 580 delivered respectable performance:

- Crysis 2 (1080p, Ultra): 45-50 FPS;

- Battlefield 3 (1080p, High): 55-60 FPS;

- Skyrim (1080p, Ultra): 60+ FPS.

In 2025, launching modern AAA games (such as Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty or Starfield) is almost impossible, even on minimal settings.

Supported Resolutions

- 1080p: Acceptable for older games;

- 1440p and 4K: An impossible task even for indie projects.

4. Professional Tasks: The First Steps of CUDA

Video Editing and 3D Modeling

Thanks to CUDA support, the GTX 580 accelerated rendering in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and Blender 2.6. However, today, its performance is 10-20 times lower than that of budget GPUs like the RTX 3050.

Scientific Computations

For tasks such as machine learning or simulations, the GTX 580 is unviable due to a lack of support for modern APIs (Tensor Cores, FP32/FP64 in current standards).

5. Power Consumption and Heat Generation

TDP and System Requirements

The card's TDP is 244 W, which is higher than many modern models (for example, the RTX 4060 is 115 W). A 600+ W power supply with two 8-pin connectors was required for stable operation.

Cooling Recommendations

The noisy turbine cooling system from NVIDIA often overheated to 90°C under load. In 2025, for a build with the GTX 580, it’s advisable to choose a case with good ventilation (such as the Cooler Master HAF XB Evo) and to replace the thermal paste.

6. Comparison with Competitors

Analogues from 2010-2012

- AMD Radeon HD 6970: Similar performance but less driver efficiency;

- NVIDIA GTX 570: A lower model with 1.25 GB of memory.

Modern Alternatives (2025)

- NVIDIA RTX 3050 (8 GB): 2-3 times faster, supports DLSS 3.5, priced at $250;

- AMD Radeon RX 6600: Comparable performance, 8 GB GDDR6, priced at $220.

7. Practical Tips for Enthusiasts

Power Supply and Compatibility

- PSU: 600+ W with an 80+ Bronze certification (for example, Corsair CX650);

- Platforms: Compatible only with motherboards that support PCIe 2.0 (modern PCIe 5.0 is backwards compatible, but the card's potential is limited).

Drivers and Operating System

Official driver support ceased in 2018. For Windows 10/11, community-modified drivers can be used, but stability is not guaranteed.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Historical value for collectors;

- Ability to run retro games without emulation;

- Simple design for modding and repairs.

Cons:

- Does not support DirectX 12 Ultimate and Vulkan;

- High power consumption;

- Lack of new drivers.

9. Final Conclusion: Who is the GTX 580 For in 2025?

This graphics card is a relic, not a tool for gaming or work. It may interest:

- Collectors assembling retro hardware;

- Enthusiasts experimenting with modding;

- Owners of old PCs wishing to restore a 2010s system.

For all other scenarios, it's better to choose modern budget GPUs: they are more efficient, quieter, and significantly more powerful. The GTX 580 remains a reminder of how rapidly technology advances—what was a flagship 15 years ago is now a museum exhibit.

Postscript

If you find a GTX 580 in the attic or at a used market—try running Crysis or Mass Effect 2 on it. It’s like taking a ride in a classic car: slow, noisy, but with soul. Just don’t forget about the thermal paste!

Basic

Label Name

NVIDIA

Platform

Desktop

Launch Date

November 2010

Model Name

GeForce GTX 580

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

1536MB

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.

384bit

Memory Clock

1002MHz

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.

192.4 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.

24.70 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.

49.41 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.

197.6 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.

1.613 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.

512

L1 Cache

64 KB (per SM)

L2 Cache

768KB

TDP

244W

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

1x 6-pin + 1x 8-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

1.613 TFLOPS

Hashcat

Score

44442 H/s

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

GeForce MX450 25W

1.7 +5.4%

Radeon R7 360E

1.645 +2%

GeForce GTX 580

1.613

Radeon R9 M380 Mac Edition

1.537 -4.7%

GeForce GTX 1050 Max Q

1.487 -7.8%

Hashcat / H/s

GeForce GTX 870M

45978 +3.5%

GeForce GTX 780M

45589 +2.6%

GeForce GTX 580

44442

Radeon Vega 8

43657 -1.8%

GeForce GTX 760

41825 -5.9%