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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Abot13 - Saturday, March 26, 2011 - link
Well there is advertising and advertising. Asking multiple monitor manufacturers to supply sets of screens in order to test them for multi monitor setups, where the best sets will be used for a longer test period to see how they keep up over time, doesnt interfere with your journalistic integrity, bit for the manufacturers the cost can be written of as PR/advertising costs.in the end your readers will get the information they want, your integrety will be intact and we also will find out what the best monitors are for multi monitor setups.
Shouldnt be that hard now should it?
PrinceGaz - Friday, March 25, 2011 - link
Once you are dealing with framerates above about 80fps at the highest resolutions and quality settings, multi-monitor is one option, or it is time to start cranking up the anti-aliasing as the results are otherwise irrelevant.With one card doing 100fps and another managing 140fps in a game, the best card for that game is the one which is cheapest even if only slightly, unless you can do something to bring the framerates down in a useful way, and higher AA than 4x is the way to go.
Ryan Smith - Friday, March 25, 2011 - link
As a general principle I agree, however 8x AA really doesn't do anything for IQ. I'd rather turn on SSAA/TrAA/MLAA, however AMD and NVIDIA do not have a common AA mode beyond DX9 SSAA. So for DX10/11 titles, MSAA is still the lowest common denominator.DarknRahl - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
I agree. Anandtech always seems to have a nvidia bias to their video card reviews.It sticks in the craw as I dig all their other reviews for other products but video card wise I go elsewhere.
B3an - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
No they dont. It just that for some reason AMD attracts more morons that like to moan about these non-existent things. And i own AMD cards before you say anything else stupid.softdrinkviking - Sunday, March 27, 2011 - link
100% agree. i own an AMD card too, and i felt like anandtech was extremely positive about the 5800 series when i bought that card.it also looks like they are leaning towards the 6990 vs the 590 in this very article. to paraphrase... the 6990 is going to be better for current new games and future games, but the 590 seems to do a bit better with older titles and new games played at lower resolutions.
i don't understand how anyone could think that makes them nvidia biased. it boggles the mind.
compvter - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
Finnish site called muropaketti did some 3x display tests with these new cardshttp://plaza.fi/muropaketti/artikkelit/naytonohjai...
and for your question i would like to answer with other question: Why buy faster cpu if you won't need faster at the moment? Granted there is no limitations like dx compatability, but still you can use your gfx card quite a while. Im still using 3870x2 card (3 years), mainly because there are so few dx11 games.
VoraciousGorak - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
For the "hype" they were throwing out with that video preview, I thought they were going to pull a fast one and launch a GeForce 6-series. But a teaser video for a super-enthusiast GPU using existing tech that'll be so rare I'll probably never physically look at one in my lifetime?Color me disappointed.
fausto412 - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
yeah.those 700 dollar cards are only to be bought by a rich few.
Improve the $400 price range...that's as high as i'll go these days.
Red Storm - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
... are you guys not testing these cards at multi-monitor resolutions? You said yourself in the review that these are marketed towards the high end. Well, the high end isn't just 30" monitors. Multi monitors boast a higher resolution and I think it's important to know how well these dual GPU monsters perform at the level they are marketed towards.