Multi-GPU Scaling

Value and Conclusion

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 SLI has it all -screaming performance, and additional features. If one GTX 580 wasn't enough, two of them in SLI will certainly help you bulldoze through just about any game, at any resolution. If 2560 x 1600 isn't enough, you can actually span your display head across multiple physical displays using NVIDIA's 3D Vision Surround feature. The added horsepower will definitely help with stereoscopic 3D gaming, when your monitor is displaying twice the information.

The GTX 580 SLI raced past other single cards in some of the latest game titles such as Aliens vs. Predator, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and Metro: 2033 giving us more than playable frame-rates at 2560 x 1600, and very high level of detail. It does seem to be a little glitched at 1920 x 1200 for Metro: 2033, but I'm sure it's something that NVIDIA will iron out pretty soon.

The SLI multi-GPU scaling figures are quite suggestive that the GeForce GTX 580 SLI overall is best suited for resolutions well over 1920 x 1200 (such as 2560 x 1440 or 2560 x 1600). It's only with 2560 x 1600, that scaling went past 60%, as it hovered below 45% in 1920 x 1200 and 1680 x 1050. Power consumption is another area where multi-GPU setups in general don't fare well, for the kind of performance churned out. Over 60W idle and over 70W for Blu-ray playback is very high. While every card will have a limited logic that senses power-heavy processing loads (such as OCCT and Furmark), throttling down clock speeds, we decided to override and test it. The GTX 580 SLI draws a whopping 627W in a worst-case situation. We'd recommend at least an 800W PSU to go with a typically configured system. Lastly, not all games will experience performance upscaling with multi-GPU. But NVIDIA does aggressively work on releasing new SLI profiles (optimizations) with each new driver release.

In all, if you have $1000 to blow at graphics, and flash the latest technology the GeForce GTX 580 SLI is a safe bet.