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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
123 Comments
View All Comments
tipoo - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
So was the WU count close to exactly double the single chip score of 360?tipoo - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
When using both chips with two WU's, I mean.alent1234 - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
i can buy an x-box and with the price of a lot of good older games a few years worth of gaming for thatMrBungle123 - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
Thats like someone watching NASCAR, seeing the price of a car and saying they could buy a honda civic and a decades worth of gas for the same money.alent1234 - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
i got sick of buying the latest video card when they hit $399 years ago. around 60fps you really don't notice any difference in speed so getting 100fps or some other number doesn't do it for me anymoretipoo - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
TBH, in the land of console ports, very few games (on a single monitor) justify a card above 200.Targon - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
That just goes to show that you play the wrong games then. The new top of the line games really can push the $400 cards fairly well at 1920x1080 and full details. With DirectX 11 support, these new games really push the limit. Then you have things like Eyefinity, driving 5860x1080, and you want more than a $200 card.cmdrdredd - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
Not really...This card isn't a one off race car. It's a production part, limited maybe but you can buy it at retail. A stock car is not stock...Azethoth - Sunday, March 27, 2011 - link
What!? Next you are gonna claim wrastling isn't real.medi01 - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
Puzzled by the cryptic color scheme on the graphs?Could you stick to red + shades of red for AMD and green + shades of green for nVidia (ok, blue for not so relevant cards)?
Or at least color the labels of the cards accordingly?