Last year around this same time the air was full of rumors about nVidia GPUs. Did they have anything at all to challenge the Evergreen lineup that had been thrown down by AMD? We heard that TSMC [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company] was having issues trying to make the giant GF100 die on their troublesome 40nm process. We saw a rush of articles about the mock-up card used by NV at their GTC 2009 keynote and so much more. Finally in the opening weeks of 2010 we saw the GF100. It was fast, it was big and it was also a power hungry GPU and puts out a ton of heat.To put it simply, the GTX480 with its GF100 was not what nVidia wanted and not what we all expected. However, not too long after we were slightly disappointed [but in many ways still impressed] with the performance of the GF100 nVidia dropped a revamped GPU on us, this was the GF104 and showed up in the fast and nimble GTX460. This inexpensive GPU also featured a streamlined design that helped to reduce heat and power consumption while maintaining performance.What’s New?The new GPU under the hood of the GTX580 is something of a new design. While the Shader Model configuration of each shader processor found on the GTX580 is the same as we saw on the GTX480 - there are some improvements to the way it works. One of the first is the inclusion of support for 16-bit Floating Point texture filtering. nVidia has also dropped in support for a new tile formats that show an improvement in Z-cull efficiency.  As a final 'improvement' the GeForce GTX580 simply has more shader, texture and CUDA cores and a much faster clock speed to boot.