Today I will be reviewing my NVIDIA pen. It declares that you should insist
on NVIDIA and it also has some other pretty good stuff on it. First of all,
NVIDIA is the number one choice in PCs and consumer electronics. Also, all
GeForce GPUs are Vista certified. Shows you how old this pen is. And it is the
number one choice for extreme gamers. And NVIDIA defined the GPU category, or
at least they acquired whoever did. Neat. Actually, that's not what
we're doing today. Today, we're going to be having a look at the GeForce GTX 590.
This is going to be only one of my performance review videos of this
particular card. I'm going to do a few. One of them is going to be all about 3D
3D Vision. So, I'll only be comparing against other GeForce cards in that one.
I am going to be doing one heavyweight showdown between the GTX 590 and the
Radeon HD 6T990. And that will actually
be at a different resolution. So, that
one's going to be at 2560 x600 with this beast of a monitor right
here. Okay. So, that's my my 30-in monitor. But this one right here that
you're watching is going to be all about 1080p performance. Now, the GTX 590 and
the 6T90 for that matter are both a little bit overpowered for 1080p. So,
what you're going to see is that they will dominate the performance charts in
all likelihood, but we're not going to see them really stretch their wings
until you start to get into things like 3D, for example, as well as uh as well
as um HD plus res resolutions like 2560
x600, what that 30-in monitor uses. So,
uh I'm going to talk a little bit about my testing methodology. For most of
these games, I'm using 4x anti-aliasing at the max. I am running all of the
games at extreme maximum settings except for Crisis. I turn motion blur to medium
because it bothers me when it's any higher than that and I don't like playing the game that way. So, I just
turn it off. Um, yeah, I think that's all there is to
say. So, we're going to be looking at Hawk 2, Lost Planet 2, Metro 2033. So,
that's uh Civilization 5. So, those are some DirectX11 titles for us. We've got
Battlefield Bad Company 2, Far Cry 2, and Crisis to have a look at some DX10
gaming. Any one of these GPUs is going to run any DirectX9 title. Great. So, I
personally don't find it all that relevant. We're going to be looking at
nextG features like tessellation more than anything else. All of those
DirectX11 titles do support tessillation in some way, shape, or form. So, that's
going to be a an emphasis of what we are doing today. So, in terms of the
configurations we're looking at, this is going to be extreme performance stuff
only. We're not going to be looking at any dinky stuff. So, we've got the 590,
the Radeon 6990. These are the two flagship uh $700 MSRP cards from NVIDIA
and AMD, respectively. We're also going to be looking at a GTX 580 SLI, which is
another solution that gives you extreme performance on dual cards rather than on
a single card because the two GTX 580s
are clocked higher than the GPUs on the 590, but
they have the drawback of consuming more power, kicking off more heat, and taking
up four slots in your computer rather than only two. Okay, so there's that.
Uh, and then we've also got uh a single
6T970, a single GTX 580, and then I've
also thrown in GTX 560Ti SLI. So, these
two cards don't appear to match, but actually they do. And that is it's just
an interesting configuration because it's a pretty good value for a high-end
gaming system. and I just wanted to see how it stacks up against what is
essentially a downclocked GF10 dual GPU solution versus a fully
clocked uh GTX 560 Ti dual GPU solution.
So uh stay tuned guys for charts and graphs.
So, one of the things I did not mention in my introduction was my test bench. I
should probably cover that. So, I've got a Core i7 2600 K Sandy Bridge processor
at 4.7 GHz. I've got 8 gigs of Mushkin
Redline DDR3600 RAM. I've got an ASRock
Fatality motherboard. I've got an Intel
um 510 series 120 gig SSD and that's
pretty much it for the relevant performance related stuff. So, let's
talk the overall results. So, I'll go through the games individually. Hawk 2
scales great. Um the CPU is able to
allow pretty much any of these cards to reach their full potential and shows us
how they all perform relative to each other to an extent. The Radeon cards
don't perform nearly as well in Hawks 2 as the GeForce cards. And that's an
architectural thing. Could be driver related. Either way, they get left in
the dust. They get creamed. Even the 6990 loses to GTX 560 SLI and a single
GTX 580. So, that's uh that's kind of an
interesting thing about that. But, it does allow us to show the relative
performance of the GeForce solutions against each other at the very least.
Lost Planet 2 is another one. It's a very demanding game. We are not CPU
limited in any way in this particular title. So, each of the GPUs is able to
really stretch their wings and show us what it is capable of. So, you see the
590 come out ahead of the 6990 in this
particular game as well. Metro 2033 is
another example of a game that all of the GPUs are able to perform
quite well in. So, the 580 SLI um
actually performs about the same as the 6T990, which means that the GTX 590,
which doesn't perform as well as 580 SLI
due to the lower clock speed, actually falls behind a little bit in that title.
That's the first one, so I can't say as well. Battlefield Bad Company 2 is
another one where we actually see pretty good scaling. And we also see fairly
close. I would say this is pretty much a tie. fairly close performance between
the 590 and the 6T990. So, Civ 5, this
one seems to be fairly CPU limited, although we do get a little bit of a
performance increase with the 580. The anomaly here is 560 SLI, which performs
just as well as 580 SLI. I got no idea why that is, but I ran it again and
again and again. So, my for my Civ 5 benchmark, basically, I take a very very
late game uh save game that I have uh from
actually playing the game. And then I've got about 30 some odd cities on the
screen. And then I zoom out all the way and I take a reading over a period of
time and then average it out. So, pretty much we're just looking at the same
static image. We're centered over one of the cities. So, each of the cards is
rendering exactly the same thing, but that particular solution performs really
well. could be a driver thing um that's preventing the single card solutions
from performing as well as the dual card solutions. Not really sure what we're
looking at there. For Far Cry 2, yeah, we're pretty much CPU limited at that
point. We are not in any way GPU bound.
Any one of these graphics cards is going to be able to give you a very good experience in Far Cry 2 if you actually
still play that game. Crisis is another one. It looks like we are not going to
be able to observe much in the way of scaling. The one that really falls
behind in Far Cry 2 is the 6T970, but the 6T90 actually performs uh out it
performs on top. It actually outperforms even the GTX 580s. So, at 1080p, it
looks like for the most part, the 590 and the 6T90 are going to be trading
blows. So, it's going to take our testing at 2560
x600 to really separate the men from the
boys in this case. Remember, 2560 x600
is going to be an advantage for anyone who's got better multiGPU scaling,
whether it's NVIDIA or AMD. It's also going to be an advantage for whoever has
the most GPU power because you're going to be far less likely to run into CPU
limitations at that kind of a resolution. But it should give AMD a
distinct advantage because more resolution means you need more video
RAM. And the 6T90 actually has 4 gigs of RAM, two per GPU, whereas the 590 has 3
gigs of RAM, 1.5 gigs per GPU. So, that
may be a bit of an advantage. The only way to know is to try out some titles at
that res. So, thank you for checking out my video review of the GTX 590 at 1920x
1080 1080p resolution. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more
unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.