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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Cali3350 - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
Last Page you have a seeming paragraph that says "Quickly, let's also..." and then stops.tipoo - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
Also "Unlike AMD isn’t using an exotic phase change thermal compound here" on the meet the card pagetipoo - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
Another one "This doesn’t the game in any meaningful manner, but it’s an example of how SLI/CF aren’t always the right tool for the job." on the computation page.ahar - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
Page 2"...NVIDIA’s advice about SLI mirror’s AMD’s advice..."
mirrors
beepboy - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
"Quickly, let's also"Nice review.
slickr - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
For $700 I'd rather buy a whole new PC.Whats the point of playing games at larger resolutions than 1600x1050.
In fact I'd say that 720p resolution is probably the best to play games at, because it tends to be easier to follow since pixels kind of move faster and you have more precision and smoother gameplay experience.
I'd be keeping my AMD 6870 that is for sure!
HangFire - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
I've once heard that the secret to happiness is learning to like the taste of cheap beer.nyran125 - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - link
did you know thats actually true lol. If you can have your coffee black, then if milk runs out you still get to enjoy life......cjl - Thursday, March 24, 2011 - link
That depends entirely on your GPU. Several can push high resolutions at >60fps, and it's just as smooth. Gaming at 2560x1600 is just an awesome experience.Azethoth - Sunday, March 27, 2011 - link
Exactly, some of us have panels with native 2560x1600. I _could_ game at some miserable 1600x1050 resolution, or I could play at my native resolution. I choose 2560x1600 and ignore all review results at inferior resolutions. Damn you Crysis, damn you!