NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580: Fermi Refined

Civilization V

The other new game in our benchmark suite is Civilization 5, the latest incarnation in Firaxis Games’ series of turn-based strategy games. Civ 5 gives us an interesting look at things that not even RTSes can match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.

Civilization V continues to vex us for a couple different reasons. For all the DirectX 11 bells and whistles it uses, it’s definitely CPU limited at times. And on the other hand, adding a second GPU definitely helps, but only for AMD, as NVIDIA even with a Civilization V SLI profile is gaining practically nothing. Finally, those GTX 480 and 580 numbers aren’t wrong – it really does get faster at higher resolutions for reasons we can only assume are due to the triangles getting larger and easier to rasterize and/or cull.

In any case the GTX 580 still manages to nearly top the charts at 2560, as in lieu of good SLI/CF scaling, the biggest single GPU is worth having. Ultimately we appear to be CPU limited at this resolution, which for reasons unknown doesn’t bode well for the 5970. Meanwhile at 1920 the picture gets turned on its head, with the GTX 580 effectively tying the GTX 480 here while at the same time AMD’s mutli-GPU configurations pull ahead.