NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 SLI Benchmarking w/ ASUS ENGTX580

FurMark 1.8.2

FurMark is a very intensive OpenGL benchmark that uses fur rendering algorithms to measure the performance of the graphics card. Fur rendering is especially adapted to overheat the GPU and that’s why FurMark is also a perfect stability and stress test tool (also called GPU burner) for the graphics card.

The benchmark was rendered in full screen mode with no AA enabled on both video cards.

Benchmark Results: Furmark showed the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 performing poorly as the GTX580’s new power monitoring hardware kicked on and slowed the card’s performance down. NVIDIA said the GTX580 dynamically adjusts performance in certain applications (Furmark and OCCT) in order to keep the power within their specifications. Here we see an example of where the new hardware monitoring management system hurts the card’s performance. We have concerns about this, but NVIDIA said they can make changes in the driver, so if a game comes out down the road a simple driver update is all that is needed to change the power level. When running a pair of GeForce GTX 580 video cards in SLI we saw more than twice the performance of a single card. This is also due to the power monitoring hardware on the video card as it is more relaxed in SLI as the algorithm used knows the cards will run hotter in an SLI system.