AMD has launched the hands-down fastest graphics card on the planet in the form of Radeon HD 6990. Competitor NVIDIA has continued its work with its own dual-GPU card GeForce GTX 590. One of the pictures of the I/O panel has now appeared.
NVIDIA is expected to launch GeForce GTX 590 on March 22nd in a wider cooperation together with Electronic Arts and Crytek. The same day anticipated action title Crysis 2 will arrive in stores, a game NVIDIA has sponsored.
AMD has put the bar up high with Radeon HD 6990 that massacred the competition earlier. We concluded that the much more expensive GeForce GTX 580 SLI still performed better than AMD’s new top model so the question is what we can expect from GeForce GTX 590.
NVIDIA tweaking frequencies
Earlier stories we have published still stands and GeForce GTX 590 will house two full-size GF110 GPUs with 512 CUDA cores each. The GPUs will sport the same 384-bit memory bus and connect a GDDR5 memory buffer of 3072 MB.
| GTX 590 | HD 6990 | GTX 580 | GTX 480 | GTX 285 | |
| Node | 40nm | 40nm | 40nm | 40nm | 55nm |
| Die size |
2 x 529 mm2* | 2 x 389 mm2 | 529 mm2* | 529 mm2* | 470 mm2 |
| Transistors | 2 x 3 000 M | 2 x 2640 M | 3000 M | 3200 M | 1400 M |
| Shader units |
1024 | 3072 | 512 | 480 | 240 |
| Texture units |
128 | 192 | 64 | 60 | 80 |
| ROPs | 96 | 64 | 48 | 48 | 28 |
| Memory type |
GDDR5 | GDDR5 | GDDR5 | GDDR5 | GDDR3 |
| Memory buffer |
3072 MB | 4092 MB | 1536 MB | 1536 MB | 1024 MB |
| Bus width |
2 x 384-bit | 2 x 256-bit | 384-bit | 384-bit | 512-bit |
| DirectX | DX11 | DX11 | DX11 | DX11 | DX10 |
| Max. output | A lot | 375W/450W | 244W | 250W | 183W |
Equipment wise this is an identical setup to GeForce GTX 580 SLI, sans the two cards. The problem for NVIDIA is that it can’t run its GPU and memory circuits at the same frequencies as GeForce GTX 580. Therefore there is a hectic optimization and tuning and going on to find the exact kill point for GeForce GTX 590, so we can expect optimal performance without overwhelming power consumption.
NVIDIA is still working on the final clocks and now that AMD has played its cards (pardon the the bad pun) it is up to NVIDIA to choose a level for its card. The goal is to counter AMD and launch the fastest DirectX 11 card today.
Beside bringing a new level of performance GeForce GTX 590 will be the first to support Surround Vision with three screen. Earlier you have needed required two cards in SLI, but since GeForce GTX 590 has two separate GPUs on the same PCB NVIDIA has chosen to equip the card with three DVI outputs and a Mini-DisplayPort. This gives GeForce GTX 590 another advantage over other single-GPU cards in NVIDIA’s assortment.
Donanimhaber has come across a photo of GeForce GTX 590 and its new I/O panel that looks rich with outputs, but at the same time poor with ventilation holes. The month of March looks to become an Epic battle between two aggressive graphics card giants and we can’t do much else that enjoy the situation.
