"This is the card we hoped the GTX 480 would have been when it was introduced. Through refinements to the Fermi architecture, NVIDIA has finally upped the ante in the video card wars. The architectural improvements come in the form of full speed FP-16 texture filtering and new tile formats for improved Z cull efficiency. The hardware was redesigned down to the transistor level for improved efficiency that allowed for increased clock speeds with lower power consumption. On top of that, the GTX 580 gets the full compliment of 512 CUDA cores (up from 480), an additional Streaming Multiprocessor and an extra Polymorph Engine."