GeForce GTX 570: specs and release date

There had been whispers going around for a few weeks about the GeForce GTX 570, but now, thanks to the guys from Sweclockers, we have the specifications, and a release date: December 7.

This new card comes with 480 shaders, like the GTX 480, 1280MB or RAM, like the GTX 470, and 732/1464/3800MHz, for the base, shader, and RAM clocks, respectively… And those clocks are higher than the 480's. Confused, yet? So am I, so let's crunch a few numbers, shall we?

Now that's better. The rightmost column indicates how much better than the GTX 480 the 570 is, as a (sometimes negative) percentage. If it's green, then it's better, if it's red, it's worse—so far so good, right? If it's yellow, it's either neutral or not directly important. For instance, memory bus width in itself doesn't matter, but it contributes to memory bandwidth, which does. Therefore, memory bus width is yellow, but memory bandwidth could be either green or red (it happens to be red in this case).

Also note that this table chart doesn't show an important detail: in some cases, namely when processing RGB9E5 or FP16 textures, the GTX 580 and 570's TMUs are twice as fast as their predecessors'. The effect of this obviously depends on whether those formats are used in a particular game, and to what extent. In practice, you could see a performance gain anywhere between 0 and 15%, maybe more in very few pathological cases.

So, compared to the GTX 480, the 570 has slightly higher shader and texturing throughput, especially considering the improved TMUs, and that should help a bit. It also has slightly higher triangle throughput, but the GTX 480 was far from bottlenecked in this area, so it shouldn't have any measurable effect. Likewise, the GTX 570 has significantly less memory, but I don't expect that to be a problem in 1920×1200; in 2560×1600 with anti-aliasing, however, it could be.

The main problems are memory bandwidth and, to a somewhat lesser extent, fillrate. Those two go down by 13~14%, and I suspect it will have a significant effect.

All in all, it's hard to say how the GTX 570 will compare to the 480. I think we'll see it being slightly faster in some games, slower in others. Perhaps something like 3~5% slower on average, but I don't expect the gap to be larger than this.

Finally, Sweclockers' information mentions a TDP of 225W, which is 25W less than the GTX 480's official TDP, and 75W less than its actual maximum power draw. Then again, the GTX 580 has a TDP of 244W, but with its limiter off, it has been measured well upwards of 300W, so who knows?

In any case, the GTX 570 looks like a good replacement for the 480: though it might be a bit slower in some games, on average it should perform similarly, but with lower power consumption, and hopefully much lower noise levels. The big question is how expensive it will be, and of course, how it will compare to AMD's Cayman, which is due just a few days after the 570's launch.

PS: I'm happy to announce that Teχlog has just reached 1000 pageviews: a modest milestone, but the first ones always are… :-)

Furthermore, I think that AMD and NVIDIA's renaming practices are dishonest and harmful to consumers, and that they need to stop.