- Dirt 2 (DirectX 11)

Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (known as Dirt 2 outside Europe and stylized, DiRT) is a racing game released in September 2009, and is the sequel to Colin McRae: Dirt. The game runs on an updated version of the EGO engine, which powered Codemasters' Race Driver: Grid as well. The engine features an updated physics engine and makes pretty through use of the DX11’s tessellation abilities.

We used the latest Dirt 2 game patch and used the built-in benchmark for the resolution of 1920x1200, various quality levels and with AA enabled.

First of all, the game is completely playable in all the resolutions and quality settings. The GTX 580 OC was the best performer under "ultra" and +16xAA. However, a GTX 460 1GB OC followed closely, offering a comparable performance. The GTX 580 was also faster than the GTX 480 and also 5970.

- Alien vs Predator Benchmark v1.03 (DirectX 11)

Rebellion has released a standalone DirectX 11 PC benchmark test based upon its shooter Aliens vs. Predator. The benchmark test requires a graphics support supporting DirectX 11, which are used to produce such fancy features as tessellation, advanced shadow sampling and DX11 anti-aliasing.

We used the default settings of the benchmark (resolution: 1920 x 1200, Texture Quality: 2, Shadow Quality: 3, Anisotropic Filtering: 16, SSAO: ON, Vertical Sync: OFF, DX11 Tessellation: ON, DX11 Advanced Shadows: ON, DX11 MSAA Samples: 1.

The Inno3D GTX 580 OC gave an average of 67.10 frames per second, which is very high for a single-GPU card. The card remains faster than a GTX 480 and only multi-GPU setups could offer higher performances.

- Lost Planet 2 Benchmark (DX9/DX11)

The Lost Planet 2 benchmark allows you to measure the performance of your graphics card using a a pre-configured route within the game. The benchmark can be run under both DX9 and DX11:

- Overclocking

We are ready to test the overclocking abilities of the already-overclocked Inno3D GTX 580 OC graphics card.

For our overclocking tests we used the latest MSI AfterBurner utility which also allows you to unlock the card's voltages allowing further tweaking. We enabled the 'Core Voltage' slider (though the 'settings' tab). The Core Voltage slider can go very high to further increase the overclocking margins although we feel that you won't need to go very high here. The 'Core' and 'Shader' sliders are synched and move as one, allowing you to play with the 'Memory' slider as well. The package also includes the 'MSI Kombustor' application that stresses your graphics card and test its stability.

We managed to get the Inno3D GTX 580 OC 430 core run at 840MHz, the memory clock reached the 2212MHz and the shaders topped at 1680MHz. We remind you that the specific card comes factory-overclocked at 820 MHz/ 1640 MHz / 1050 MHz.

Under these circumstances, the reported temperature for the core was 72 degrees C: