Crysis (DirectX 10)
As the Crysis series slowly becomes out dated, it’s still one of the few DirectX 10 titles we can always rely on to chew on any video card. It’s not the game’s fault that gaming developers blew past DX10 like it was Vista.
Even with such a rich, lush green environment going on during the benchmark, the latest drivers seemingly do a great job of giving us very playable frame rates, even with the GTX 460. The great thing about the GTX 580 is that it makes the game run very, very smoothly. There are very few instances where the card seems to slow. Too bad the bug at the end prevented me from ever finishing the game.
Farcry 2 (DirectX 10)
There was a change of colors here. The NVidia cards all out performed the HD 5870 which seemed to have more trouble with the flames. Of course, the GTX 580 enjoys a strong 12 frame per second improvement over the GTX 480. Pure pristine country driving is what you’ll get.
Resident Evil (DirectX 10)
I picked Resident Evil 5 because it’s one of the very few DX10 free benchmarks around from CAPCOM. In rinse and repeat fashion, the GTX 580 leaves everything in the dust using the benchmark’s maximum settings at 1920 x 1200 resolution. This time, the HD 5870 makes better use of its GPU. Still, the entire NVidia series seems to enjoy this title.
HAWX 2 (DirectX 11)
This beautiful mountainous aerial benchmark takes us on a tour of the country side showing us a little Tessellation that accompanies DirectX 11. The GTX 580 slaughters the rest with over 19 frames more than even GTX 480.
Metro 2033 (DirectX 11)
This game can almost be called the “new Crysis”, but without the bugs. While all the cards produced beautiful graphics, but barely playable frame rates, the GTX 580 just seems to go that much further. If you’re using 1080p resolution, you can expect about a 5 frame increase over the 1200p resolution.
STALKER: Pripyat (DirectX11)
This benchmark is a very demanding test of most of any GPU’s features and capabilities and this benchmark seemed to really favor the NVidia cards, again. The GTX 480 and 580 leave the ATI card in the dust providing extremely smooth viewing results. Note that the Sun Shade test with all its fancy lighting effects slow all the cards with the GTX 580 leading the pack with 51 smooth frames.