GTX 580 3GB Ultra Charged is specially designed high performance graphics card for enthusiast who like to play games at very high resolutions (above 1920) with highest antialiasing enabled. We got the card from Point of View / TGT and we want to share our first impressions with our readers.
Great thing about this card, apart from the fact that you can put a tremendous amount of data into the video buffer, is that the GPU performance is brought to the next level thanks to factory overclocking, which boosted GPU frequency from reference 772MHz to 841MHz.
GTX 580 3GB Ultra Charged
It is not easy to show highlights of this card using only standard game settings or playing games on standard resolutions. TGT is not targeting uninformed customers, who consider massive RAM a sign of GPU power, but the informed gamers who like to know that they'll never be let down by available graphics RAM.
We played Aliens vs Predator game at resolution 2560x1600 using 32 CSAA and 16AF. From the picture below, you can see that the used memory exceeded 1.5GB, which is actually a limitation with standard GTX 580.
We will also try to find out how GTX 580 3GB UC copes with other games and downsampling (a technique used to fool the application to use a resolution higher than the screen resolution).
The same game played with standard GTX 580 1.5GB card at the same resolution and settings will run into memory limitations, as you can see from the picture below.
GTX 580 1.5GB
As you can see from the picture below, GTX 580 3GB Ultra Charged card is equipped with reference cooling, which can be very loud during gaming. It somehow manages to keep the GPU temperature on the safe side during intensive gaming. We measured 10 Celsius more compared to the reference card.
