Nvidia GTX 580 vapour chamber detailed

Details on Nvidia’s upcoming GTX 580 GPU continue to spring up as the company gears up for the official launch of the product. The latest rumour pegs the launch for 9 November 2010.

Over the weekend Nvidia shared some info about the GTX 580 at the PDXLAN, a LAN event that takes place somewhere along the West coast of the USA.

Nvidia has opted for vapour chamber cooling on the GTX 580. A vapour chamber works thusly: The contact point of the cooling heatsink and the GPU is a hollow chamber containing a fluid which heats up an evaporates. The evaporating fluid condenses on the heat spreader above, which dissipates the heat with the help of a fan. The condensed fluid returns to the bottom of the vapour chamber ready to be warmed up once again. Effectively this is a self-contained water cooler.

The slide captured at PDXLAN will likely provide a better explanation.

nvidia_vapour_chamber

Speaking at the event, Nvidia’s Tom Petersen claimed that the GTX 580 is cooler and quieter than their current GTX 480. Apparently the new cooler and fan combo will produce 47dBA during a gamin session, which isn’t exactly whisper quiet. When coupled with CPU fans and case fans, PC gamers are probably guaranteed that same comforting hum they have become accustomed to.

Peterson also boasted that the card will be the fastest DirectX 11 card available upon its release. Nvidia is punting the tessellation abilities of this new card. Tessellation is a core element of Direct X 11 – it is the ability to take datasets of polygons and divide them into suitable smaller combinations of polygons for rendering. In the case of real-time game graphics rendering, Tessellation typically divides the polygon data into triangles.

To demonstrate exactly what this means for game rendering, Peterson came equipped with a couple of tech demos – Aliens vs Triangles and Endless City. Both can be seen in the video below, along with some footage of the GTX 580 running CoD: Black Ops.