Nvidia GeForce GTX 580M, 570M are Official

Nvidia has just taken the lid of the most powerful mobile GPU to date–the GeForce GTX 580M. The company has also announced that the 17-inch Alienware M17x as well as the 18-inch Alienware M18x will be available with this graphics card in a presumably near future–the M17x with one 580M and the M18x with an option for dual 580M’s in SLI, which would solidify its position as the “most powerful 18-inch gaming laptop in the universe”.

They have also seen fit to release a video showing off the power of two GTX 580M’s in SLI, running Crysis 2 in all its DX11-updated glory, with hi-res textures, 1080p resolution and the details set to “Ultra” (you can blow up this YouTube clip to 1080p):

Nvidia simultaneously releases the GTX 570M, which replaces the (very rare) GTX 470M and improves performance by about 20% compared to its predecessor. Both of the new GPUs will of course support all the existing Nvidia inventions, including 3D Vision, PhysX and the power-saving/graphics-switching Optimus technology. In addition, Nvidia claims improvements in power efficiency; performance per Watt has been increased by 20% in the new cards.

Here’s a quick comparison chart to get an overview of what separates the GTX 580M vs. the GTX 485M that it replaces, as well as the 570M vs. the 470M in terms of specifications:

GTX 580M vs 485M, 570M vs 470M

Except for the clock speeds, it’s hard to see much difference between the cards just from looking at the specs. One noteworthy difference is that the number of shaders/CUDA cores is higher in the 570M. On the other hand a comparison to the 470M is essentially useless, since that card was barely used. Hopefully the newer version will find its way into some new laptops, especially if it comes at a competitive price point versus the GTX 580M. There’s no risk of the 580M being affordable, let alone two of them.

Another difference that you can’t see in the specs is Nvidia’s alleged power optimization. If the new GPUs can really deliver better performance per Watt (and we’ll take Nvidia’s word for it), then the overclocking potential should also be better in theory. So while overclocking your 485M to the same clocks is almost certainly doable, its successor might go even higher when put to the test (all of this is just speculation, obviously).

Other than the Alienware M17x and M18x, another candidate that has been mentioned for the fastest GPU so far is Clevo–the ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) that delivers barebones to Origin PC and Sager among others, so Dell will likely get some competition before long. Another machine that has been mentioned as a candidate for the GTX 570M is the new MSI GT780R (thanks again, Chatmort).

Jesper Berg
Jesper Berg

Gaming hardware enthusiast since the 80286 era.

8 Comments
  1. Hi AGC072,
    Sounds like an interesting setup! Is that a notebook or a desktop of some sort? I’m asking because the layout of the MXM boards is sometimes proprietary (e.g. Asus), so the MXM standard is unfortunately no guarantee that these cards will work in any machine 😐

  2. Sorry I meant pci-e 2.0!!!

  3. I h ave a motherboard that support pci-3 2.0 up to 8X lanes.

    It currently has X2 9800S MXM cards running SLI, and I want to upgrade to X2 570M GTX.

    I don’t know if the 570M GTX will work with my connector only supporting 8 lanes.

    Can anyone help?

  4. […] Alienware M18x is now available with dual NvidiaGTX 580M graphics cards in SLI or dual AMD Radeon HD 6990M GPUs in CrossFireX. Simply put it’s an […]

  5. Figures… 🙁 On the other hand the tesselation feature has been oversold IMO. I just looked at a few comparison shots of DX9 vs DX11 Crysis 2 (with hi-res textures) and was thoroughly unimpressed (http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/06/29/crysis_2_dx11_tessellation_highres_texture_pack). Sure it looks better in places, but it’s really hard to justify the huge performance cost for those relatively small improvements. Crysis 2 still looks great in good-old DX9 and it will run smoothly at any resolution with a 560M, for example.

  6. Update: One gtx580M cannot handle Crysis 2 and it’s new patch. Sources say it play at 20fps with 1080P resolution. So SLI 580M would be needed. At 1200$ this upgrade isn’t worth it. :/ Desktop gaming would be the only way for now without paying 3K$, only around 2.

  7. No problem pal, I just like to help. 😉 Keep up the good work!

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