NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 590: Duking It Out For The Single Card King
by Ryan Smith on March 24, 2011 9:00 AM ESTCrysis: Warhead
Kicking things off as always is Crysis: Warhead, still one of the toughest games in our benchmark suite. Even three years since the release of the original Crysis, “but can it run Crysis?” is still an important question, and for three years the answer was “no.” Dual-GPU halo cards can now play it at Enthusiast settings at high resolutions, but for everything else max settings are still beyond the grasp of a single card.
Crysis is often a bellwether for overall performance; if that’s the case here, then NVIDIA and the GTX 590 is not off to a good start at the all-important resolution of 2560x1600.
AMD gets some really good CrossFire scaling under Crysis, and as a result the 6990 has no problem taking the lead here. At a roughly 10% disadvantage it won’t make or break the game for NVIDIA, but given the similar prices they don’t want to lose too many games.
Meanwhile amongst NVIDIA’s own stable of cards, the stock GTX 590 ends up slightly underperforming the GTX 570 SLI. As we discussed in our look at theoretical numbers, the GTX 590’s advantage/disadvantage depends on what the game in question taxes the most. Crysis is normally shader and memory bandwidth heavy, which is why the GTX 590 never falls too far behind with its memory bandwidth advantage. EVGA’s mild overclock is enough to close the gap however, delivering identical performance. A further overclock can improve performance some more, but surprisingly not by all that much.
The minimum framerate ends up looking better for NVIDIA. The GTX 590 is still behind the 6990, but now it’s only by about 5%, while the EVGA GTX 590 squeezes past by all of .1 frame per second.
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WhatsTheDifference - Monday, April 4, 2011 - link
how many years has it been since *any* 4890 has been represented in the charts..? why is it this way? come on. exclude nV's earlier gen top dog and maybe no one will notice.Scandalman - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - link
Interesting article, however it would be useful to know what power supplies you recommend.I am interested in using a pair of these cards for running an OpenCL application flat out and I want to know if my Tagan 1100W supply is sufficient; It's running a GA890-GPA-UD3H/Phenom x4 955 with two unlocked 6950's at the moment.
Looks like it might just do it with a whisker to spare, but I'd like to avoid expensive pyrotechnics.
nyran125 - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - link
im not really into giving all my money to the same manufactorer every year just to buy a new video card that does nothing else accept increase FPS by 3-10 fps. Sometimes it doesnt increase it at all. If what you have already owns everything out there, i dont see the point. I only see the point if what you have DOESNT do what you want it to do. AMD 6870 is running every game iver played so far on max withotu issue at highest resolution. We are in the console era.Unless your playing Arma 2 and Shogun total war 2, but even then thats more CPU related adn an amd 6870 combined with a high end cpu prety much gets the job done at high res. NOT 30" though. Bu my eyes are screwed up enough from staring at a montier, than even want to go to 30 ".