S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky is a very eerie game. The Zone is a huge abandoned territory, with twenty-year-old dilapidated buildings, overgrown with forests and anomalous vegetation. It is a territory with deserted surface and underground research facilities, neglected military bases and testing grounds for new technologies. The radioactive land is covered with sores of burned out soil, poisonous fogs, and deadly gravitational anomalies. It is a world of a terrible anthropogenic disaster, and in the center of this hell sit the remains of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
The in-game Zone is a reconstruction of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the 30-kilometer Exclusion Zone around it. Moving along the storyline, the player will visit such places as the Swamps, the Red Forest, the Limansk city and, of course, the sarcophagus of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Many in-game locations have real prototypes.
The GTX580 is a perfect card for STALKER at this resolution, managing to keep the frame rates above 30 at all times. The overclocked AMP²! produces a couple of extra frames per second when directly compared against the reference card. Once we move below the GTX570, the other solutions on test have problems maintaining steady frame rates.
Wow that is an amazing looking card. if they could drop the price I think it would sell great for them, ive never seen a 580 peak at 60c in furmark
Wait a minute, are they seriously trying to charge £500 in the UK for a GTX580? thats only 60 less than a 590 !
This has to be voted as one of the prettiest video cards on the market. ever. Its what LL Cool J would have in his rap days.
Nice cooler, if they dropped the price by £100 it would be a great buy, not sure how they worked that out. its not worth £80 more than the Asus Direct CU II, regardless of gold fans.
That is a brilliant graphics card, and I like the PCB design, I wish nvidia had gotten it right with the 590, but maybe thats why partners are charging so much for 580, they know its much better really long term. ?
QUESTION TO THE REVIEWER:
The review says the Zotac GTX 580 AMP² is the model reviewed, and clearly lists 1.5GB…but the Zotac website lists the AMP² as having 3GB. So what model was really reviewed, please? The 3GB AMP²? Or the 1.5GB AMP?
Thanks in advance.
GPuz screen is right on page 2, is 3GB.
Thanks, Zardon, and thanks for the review. FYI page one needs correcting, it currently reads “ships with a 815mhz core clock, an increase from 772mhz on the reference card, and the 1536MB of GDDR5 memory is overclocked from 1002mhz to 1026mhz”
Thanks, sorry about that. fixed.