Nvidia Strikes Back with the GeForce GTX 590

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With AMD having recently revised their flagship Dual-GPU card, the HD 6990, Nvidia couldn’t have stood by and watched.

The Nvidia response came in the form of the GTX 590, a dual core graphics card that has some serious performance to offer for the highend gamer that just can’t get enough.

Much like most dual-core GPUs it is a couple of high performance chips (in this case, those from a GTX 580) that have been watered down a bit.

Here’s what the specs look like, a 1.024 number of total CUDA cores, 94 ROPs, 3GB of GDDR5 RAM and then the Nvidia GTX 590 speeds turn up.

As an amator gamer, I’m already amazed, but once you get a core clock speed of 607 MHz, 1.2 GHz for the shader clock and you find that the memory is clocked at 3.4 GHz you can’t help but drop the jaw a bit.

Here’s the situation though, the AMD Radeon HD 6990 is technically still faster than Nvidia’s new GTX 590. That has me a bit disappointed.

According to some of the early tests, benchmarks and reviewers, the Nvidia GTX 590 doesn’t only suffer as far as the specifications are concerned.

It would seem that once the Nvidia GTX 590 and the AMD Radeon HD6990 are put head to head, the AMD comes on top at high resolutions such as 2560×1600.

At a “lower resolution” of 1920×1080 the advantage seems to be on the Nvidia GTX 590′s side.

To be fair, even though the AMD Radeon HD6990 is still technically on top, the Nvidia GTX 590 is so close behind and with prices that are identical at around $700 that it doesn’t really matter.

These ultra high-end video cards are now going to be chosen depending on how much of a fanboy of the brand you are, the SLI vs Crossfire debate and the number of DVI connectors versus mini HD.

If you’ve made your choice, either of these dual-gpu setups, will offer more than enough performance for at least a year or so to come.

For me, the Nvidia GTX 590 is the clear choice, perhaps even a couple of them running in a SLI setup.

That choice can be helped along by the improved cooling system (that features two vapor chambers) of the Nvidia GTX 590 which allows for quieter and smoother running, especially in a dual car setup, no matter what the scaling is.