NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 590: Duking It Out For The Single Card King
by Ryan Smith on March 24, 2011 9:00 AM ESTBattlefield: Bad Company 2
Now approaching a year old, Bad Company 2 remains as one of the cornerstone DX11 games in our benchmark suite. Based on the Frostbite 1.5 engine, it will be replaced in complexity by the DX10+ only Frostbite 2 engine (and Battlefield 3) later this year. As BC2 doesn’t have a built-in benchmark or recording mode, here we take a FRAPS run of the jeep chase in the first act, which as an on-rails portion of the game provides very consistent results and a spectacle of explosions, trees, and more.
Historically Bad Company 2 favors two patterns in our tests: it favors shader speed, and it just favors AMD in general. Today is no exception, and while the GTX 590 can hit nearly 80fps, that’s still 10fps short of the 6990. Given that it’s normally shader bound our overclocked cards pick up the slack, but it’s not enough—not even the GTX 590 OC can reach the 6990, let alone an overclocked 6990.
Meanwhile our water benchmark gives us a good idea of what minimum framerates are like. Interestingly NVIDIA more than chips away at AMD’s lead here, and the GTX 590 and its overclocked variants top the charts. Given these scores it’s likely we’re approaching a non-GPU bottleneck in the game.
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Ruger22C - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
Don't spew nonsense to the people reading this! Write a disclaimer if you're going to do that.The Finale of Seem - Saturday, March 26, 2011 - link
Um...no. For one, HUD elements tend to shrink in physical size as resolution rises, meaning that games with a lot of HUD (WoW comes to mind) benefit by letting you see more of what's going on, which means that 720p is pretty friggin' awful. For two, 1920x1080 has become the standard for most monitors over 21" or so, and a lot of gamers get 1920x1080 displays, especially if they're also watching 1080p video or doing significant multitasking. Non-native resolutions look like ass, and as such, 1600x1050 is right out as you won't want to play at anything but 1920x1080.Now, you can say that there isn't much point going above that, and right now, that may be so as cost is pretty prohibitive, but that may not always be the case.
rav55 - Thursday, March 31, 2011 - link
What good is it if you can't buy it? Nvidia cherry picked the gpu's to work on this card and they could only release a little over 1000 units. It is now sold out in the US and available in limited amounts in Europe.Basically the GTX 590 is vapourware!!! What a joke!
wellortech - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
Reviews seem to still agree that 6950CF or 570 SLI are just as powerful, and much less expensive. Guess I'll be keeping my pair of 6950s while continuing to enjoy 30" 2550x1600 heaven.DanNeely - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
Yeah, these only really make sense if you're going for a 4GPU setup in an ATX box, or have a larger mATX case and want to 2 GPUs and some other card.jfelano - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
You go boy. I'll continue to have a life.The_Comfy_Chair - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
Get over yourself.YOU are trolling on a forum about a video card on a tech-geek site on the internet. You have no more of a life than wellortech or anyone else here - self included.
ShumOSU - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
You're 16,000 pixels short. :-)egandt - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
Would have been better to see what these cards did with 3x 1920x1200 displays, as obviously they are overkill for any single display.Dudler - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
Couldn't agree more, but since we know from the 1,5 GB 580 that the nVida card do poorly in higher resolutions, AnandTech is probably never test any such setup. Expect 12x10 instead, as nVidia tends to do better in low resolutions than Amd. 19x12 is already irrelevant with these cards.