NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 Review Part 1/3 1080p Gaming Performance Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,608 words · ~8 min read
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Today I will be reviewing my NVIDIA pen. It declares that you should insist
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on NVIDIA and it also has some other pretty good stuff on it. First of all,
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NVIDIA is the number one choice in PCs and consumer electronics. Also, all
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GeForce GPUs are Vista certified. Shows you how old this pen is. And it is the
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number one choice for extreme gamers. And NVIDIA defined the GPU category, or
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at least they acquired whoever did. Neat. Actually, that's not what
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we're doing today. Today, we're going to be having a look at the GeForce GTX 590.
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This is going to be only one of my performance review videos of this
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particular card. I'm going to do a few. One of them is going to be all about 3D
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3D Vision. So, I'll only be comparing against other GeForce cards in that one.
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I am going to be doing one heavyweight showdown between the GTX 590 and the
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Radeon HD 6T990. And that will actually
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be at a different resolution. So, that
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one's going to be at 2560 x600 with this beast of a monitor right
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here. Okay. So, that's my my 30-in monitor. But this one right here that
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you're watching is going to be all about 1080p performance. Now, the GTX 590 and
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the 6T90 for that matter are both a little bit overpowered for 1080p. So,
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what you're going to see is that they will dominate the performance charts in
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all likelihood, but we're not going to see them really stretch their wings
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until you start to get into things like 3D, for example, as well as uh as well
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as um HD plus res resolutions like 2560
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x600, what that 30-in monitor uses. So,
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uh I'm going to talk a little bit about my testing methodology. For most of
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these games, I'm using 4x anti-aliasing at the max. I am running all of the
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games at extreme maximum settings except for Crisis. I turn motion blur to medium
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because it bothers me when it's any higher than that and I don't like playing the game that way. So, I just
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turn it off. Um, yeah, I think that's all there is to
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say. So, we're going to be looking at Hawk 2, Lost Planet 2, Metro 2033. So,
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that's uh Civilization 5. So, those are some DirectX11 titles for us. We've got
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Battlefield Bad Company 2, Far Cry 2, and Crisis to have a look at some DX10
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gaming. Any one of these GPUs is going to run any DirectX9 title. Great. So, I
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personally don't find it all that relevant. We're going to be looking at
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nextG features like tessellation more than anything else. All of those
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DirectX11 titles do support tessillation in some way, shape, or form. So, that's
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going to be a an emphasis of what we are doing today. So, in terms of the
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configurations we're looking at, this is going to be extreme performance stuff
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only. We're not going to be looking at any dinky stuff. So, we've got the 590,
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the Radeon 6990. These are the two flagship uh $700 MSRP cards from NVIDIA
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and AMD, respectively. We're also going to be looking at a GTX 580 SLI, which is
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another solution that gives you extreme performance on dual cards rather than on
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a single card because the two GTX 580s
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are clocked higher than the GPUs on the 590, but
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they have the drawback of consuming more power, kicking off more heat, and taking
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up four slots in your computer rather than only two. Okay, so there's that.
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Uh, and then we've also got uh a single
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6T970, a single GTX 580, and then I've
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also thrown in GTX 560Ti SLI. So, these
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two cards don't appear to match, but actually they do. And that is it's just
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an interesting configuration because it's a pretty good value for a high-end
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gaming system. and I just wanted to see how it stacks up against what is
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essentially a downclocked GF10 dual GPU solution versus a fully
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clocked uh GTX 560 Ti dual GPU solution.
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So uh stay tuned guys for charts and graphs.
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So, one of the things I did not mention in my introduction was my test bench. I
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should probably cover that. So, I've got a Core i7 2600 K Sandy Bridge processor
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at 4.7 GHz. I've got 8 gigs of Mushkin
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Redline DDR3600 RAM. I've got an ASRock
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Fatality motherboard. I've got an Intel
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um 510 series 120 gig SSD and that's
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pretty much it for the relevant performance related stuff. So, let's
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talk the overall results. So, I'll go through the games individually. Hawk 2
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scales great. Um the CPU is able to
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allow pretty much any of these cards to reach their full potential and shows us
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how they all perform relative to each other to an extent. The Radeon cards
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don't perform nearly as well in Hawks 2 as the GeForce cards. And that's an
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architectural thing. Could be driver related. Either way, they get left in
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the dust. They get creamed. Even the 6990 loses to GTX 560 SLI and a single
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GTX 580. So, that's uh that's kind of an
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interesting thing about that. But, it does allow us to show the relative
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performance of the GeForce solutions against each other at the very least.
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Lost Planet 2 is another one. It's a very demanding game. We are not CPU
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limited in any way in this particular title. So, each of the GPUs is able to
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really stretch their wings and show us what it is capable of. So, you see the
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590 come out ahead of the 6990 in this
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particular game as well. Metro 2033 is
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another example of a game that all of the GPUs are able to perform
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quite well in. So, the 580 SLI um
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actually performs about the same as the 6T990, which means that the GTX 590,
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which doesn't perform as well as 580 SLI
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due to the lower clock speed, actually falls behind a little bit in that title.
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That's the first one, so I can't say as well. Battlefield Bad Company 2 is
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another one where we actually see pretty good scaling. And we also see fairly
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close. I would say this is pretty much a tie. fairly close performance between
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the 590 and the 6T990. So, Civ 5, this
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one seems to be fairly CPU limited, although we do get a little bit of a
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performance increase with the 580. The anomaly here is 560 SLI, which performs
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just as well as 580 SLI. I got no idea why that is, but I ran it again and
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again and again. So, my for my Civ 5 benchmark, basically, I take a very very
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late game uh save game that I have uh from
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actually playing the game. And then I've got about 30 some odd cities on the
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screen. And then I zoom out all the way and I take a reading over a period of
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time and then average it out. So, pretty much we're just looking at the same
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static image. We're centered over one of the cities. So, each of the cards is
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rendering exactly the same thing, but that particular solution performs really
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well. could be a driver thing um that's preventing the single card solutions
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from performing as well as the dual card solutions. Not really sure what we're
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looking at there. For Far Cry 2, yeah, we're pretty much CPU limited at that
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point. We are not in any way GPU bound.
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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
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still play that game. Crisis is another one. It looks like we are not going to
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be able to observe much in the way of scaling. The one that really falls
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behind in Far Cry 2 is the 6T970, but the 6T90 actually performs uh out it
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performs on top. It actually outperforms even the GTX 580s. So, at 1080p, it
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looks like for the most part, the 590 and the 6T90 are going to be trading
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blows. So, it's going to take our testing at 2560
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x600 to really separate the men from the
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boys in this case. Remember, 2560 x600
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is going to be an advantage for anyone who's got better multiGPU scaling,
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whether it's NVIDIA or AMD. It's also going to be an advantage for whoever has
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the most GPU power because you're going to be far less likely to run into CPU
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limitations at that kind of a resolution. But it should give AMD a
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distinct advantage because more resolution means you need more video
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RAM. And the 6T90 actually has 4 gigs of RAM, two per GPU, whereas the 590 has 3
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gigs of RAM, 1.5 gigs per GPU. So, that
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may be a bit of an advantage. The only way to know is to try out some titles at
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that res. So, thank you for checking out my video review of the GTX 590 at 1920x
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1080 1080p resolution. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more
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