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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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?