Benchmark: 3DMark 11
3DMark 11 is the latest version of this hugely popular synthetic benchmark. Making use of DX11 features such as tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading, it provides modern-day results and is available as a free download.
3DMark 11 gets us off and running and it shows the HAWK Edition to be a mild improvement over a reference ASUS GTX 580.
The combined test, which runs a rigid-body physics simulation on a moderate number of objects as well as soft-body physics using DirectCompute and the Bullet physics library, benefits from the larger 3GB frame buffer. There's no ignoring the obvious, though; Gigabyte's GTX 580 SOC, with less memory but higher operating frequencies, offers the best GTX 580 performance in this benchmark.
