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Nvidia GeForce GTX 590 3 GB Review: Firing Back With 1024 CUDA Cores

Nvidia GeForce GTX 590 3 GB Review: Firing Back With 1024 CUDA Cores
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AMD shot for—and successfully achieved—the coveted “fastest graphics card in the world” title with its Radeon HD 6990. Now, Nvidia is gunning for that freshly-claimed honour with a dual-GF110-powered board that speaks softly and carries a big stick.

Today, the worst-kept secret in technology officially gets the spotlight. Hot on the heels of AMD’s Radeon HD 6990 4 GB introduction three weeks ago, Nvidia is following up with its GeForce GTX 590 3 GB. According to Nvidia, it could have introduced this card more than a month ago. However, we know it continued revising its plans for a new flagship well into March. The result is a board deliberately intended to emphasize elegance, immediately after the Radeon HD 6990 bludgeoned us over the head with abrasive acoustics.

Pursuing quietness might sound ironic, given that GPUs based on Nvidia’s Fermi architecture are notoriously hot and power-hungry. To think the company could put two on a single PCB and not out-scream AMD’s dual-Cayman-based card is almost ludicrous. And yet, that’s what Nvidia says it did.

It admits that getting there wasn’t an easy task, though. Compromises were made. For example, Nvidia uses the same mid-mounted fan design for which we chided AMD. It dropped the clocks on its GPUs to help keep thermals under control. And the card still uses more power than any graphics product we’ve ever tested.

But it’s quiet. Crazy-freaking quiet. The quietest dual-GPU board I’ve tested since ATI’s Rage Fury Maxx (how’s that for back-in-the-day?). Mission accomplished on that front. The question remains, though: was Nvidia forced to give up the farm just to show AMD that hot cards don't have to make lots of noise?

Under The Hood: Dual GF110s, Both Uncut

In my discussions with Nvidia, the company made it clear that it wanted to use two GF110 processors, and it didn’t want to hack them up. Uncut GF110s, as you probably already know from reading GeForce GTX 580 And GF110: The Way Nvidia Meant It To Be Played, employ four Graphics Processing Clusters, each with four Streaming Multiprocessors. You’ll find 32 CUDA cores in each SM, totalling 512 cores per GPU. Each SM also offers four texturing units, yielding 64 across the entire chip. Of course, there’s one Polymorph engine per SM as well, though as we’ve seen in the past, Nvidia’s approach to parallelizing geometry doesn’t necessarily scale very well.

The GPU’s back-end features six ROP partitions, each capable of outputting eight 32-bit integer pixels at a time, adding up to 48 pixels per clock. An aggregate 384-bit memory bus is divisible into a sextet of 64-bit interfaces, and you’ll find 256 MB of GDDR5 memory at all six stops. That adds up to 1.5 GB of memory per GPU, which is how you arrive at the GeForce GTX 590’s 3 GB.

Nvidia ties GTX 590’s GF110 processors together using its own NF200 bridge, which takes a single 16-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface and multiplexes it out to two 16-lane paths—one for each GPU.


GeForce GTX 590
GeForce GTX 580Radeon HD 6990
Radeon HD 6970
Radeon HD 6950
Manufacturing Process
40 nm TSMC40 nm TSMC40 nm TSMC40 nm TSMC
40 nm TSMC
Die Size
2 x 520 mm²520 mm²2 x 389 mm²389 mm²389 mm²
Transistors
2 x 3 billion3 billion2 x 2.64 billion2.64 billion
2.64 billion
Engine Clock
607 MHz
772 MHz830 MHz880 MHz
800 MHz
Stream Processors / CUDA Cores
1024
5123072
1536
1408
Compute Performance
2.49 TFLOPS
1.58 TFLOPS5.1 TFLOPS
2.7 TFLOPS
2.25 TFLOPS
Texture Units
128
64192
96
88
Texture Fillrate
77.7 Gtex/s
49.4 Gtex/s159.4 Gtex/s
84.5 Gtex/s
70.4 Gtex/s
ROPs
96
4864
32
32
Pixel Fillrate
58.3 Gpix/s
37.1 Gpix/s53.1 Gpix/s
28.2 Gpix/s
25.6 Gpix/s
Frame Buffer
2 x 1.5 GB GDDR5
1.5 GB GDDR52 x 2 GB GDDR5
2 GB GDDR5
2 GB GDDR5
Memory Clock
853 MHz
1002 MHz1250 MHz
1375 MHz
1250 MHz
Memory Bandwidth
2 x 163.9 GB/s
(384-bit)
192 GB/s (384-bit)2 x 160 GB/s (256-bit)176 GB/s (256-bit)
160 GB/s (256-bit)
Maximum Board Power
365 W
244 W375 W
250 W
200 W

What changed from the ill-received GF100-based GeForce GTX 480 to GF110? From my GeForce GTX 580 review:

“The GPU itself is largely the same. This isn’t a GF100 to GF104 sort of change, where Shader Multiprocessors get reoriented to improve performance at mainstream price points (read: more texturing horsepower). The emphasis here remains compute muscle. Really, there are only two feature changes: full-speed FP16 filtering and improved Z-cull efficiency.

GF110 can perform FP16 texture filtering in one clock cycle (similar to GF104), while GF100 required two cycles. In texturing-limited applications, this speed-up may translate into performance gains. The culling improvements give GF110 an advantage in titles that suffer lots of overdraw, helping maximize available memory bandwidth. On a clock-for-clock basis, Nvidia claims these enhancements have up to a 14% impact (or so).”

Other than that, we’re still talking about two pieces of silicon manufactured on TSMC’s 40 nm node and composed of roughly 3 billion transistors each. At 520 square millimetres, GF110 is substantially larger than AMD’s Cayman processor, which measures 389 mm² and is made up of 2.64 billion transistors.

Now, it’s great to get all of those resources (times two) on GeForce GTX 590. However, while the GeForce GTX 580 employs a 772 MHz graphics clock and 1002 MHz memory clock, the GPUs on GTX 590 slow things down to 607 MHz and 853 MHz, respectively.

As a result, this card’s performance isn’t anywhere near what you’d expect from two of Nvidia’s fastest single-GPU flagships. That might be alright, though. After all, AMD launched Radeon HD 6970 as a GeForce GTX 570-contender; the 580 sat in a league of its own. So, although AMD’s Radeon HD 6990 comes very close to doubling the performance of the company’s quickest single-GPU cards, GeForce GTX 590 doesn’t have to do the same thing in order to be competitive at the price point AMD already established and Nvidia plans to match.

We already know what AMD had to do in order to deliver “the fastest graphics card in the world.” Now, how does Nvidia counter?

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  • 1 Hide
    blubbey , 24 March 2011 19:55
    Awesome performance. Just awesome. That 6990 sounds like a hair-dryer too!
  • 1 Hide
    amstar , 25 March 2011 00:12
    Woah, the 6990 got destroyed for sure. They're almost same price, but 6990 is way louder.

    I still wouldn't buy either, even if I had the cash to splash. They need to make aftermarket versions to make them even quieter, like a 3 fan design (similar to the one on the Gigabyte GTX 480 SOC). These temperatures are still too high for comfort on these stock dual-GPU cards. Also they need to release these with water blocks already installed.
  • -1 Hide
    silverblue , 25 March 2011 02:27
    amstarWoah, the 6990 got destroyed for sure.


    I'm trying to figure out if you're being ironic or not. :) 
  • 0 Hide
    amstar , 25 March 2011 06:41
    Quote:
    I'm trying to figure out if you're being ironic or not. :) 



    Not.

    My friend bought a 6990 2 days ago. Christ that thing sounds like a lawnmower in his bedroom. And I thought my PC with 3x80mm el cheapo fans was loud.

    I'll take a quieter card over one with slightly faster performance but more noise any day.

    And what you're forgetting is the fact that these drivers still won't be "end all" performance indicators (my GTX 460 has gained at least 15% performance in newer games over release drivers). Give it a month or two and I'm sure most if not all performance gains by the 6990 will be gone and the GTX 590 will take the performance crown.
  • 1 Hide
    LePhuronn , 25 March 2011 16:38
    amstarGive it a month or two and I'm sure most if not all performance gains by the 6990 will be gone and the GTX 590 will take the performance crown.


    Unless, say, AMD improve their drivers too /facepalm
  • 0 Hide
    LePhuronn , 25 March 2011 17:15
    OK, AMD retain the fastest card crown but they have a long way to go before they can cement that title in 4-way scaling.

    I also think Nvidia have shot themselves in the foot with 3GB RAM because the GTX 590 doesn't perform acceptably at the highest screen resolutions, where this thing is supposed to operate at.

    But, the hat tip still goes to Nvidia because it's so much quieter. I don't think the "strap a water block to it" argument is valid because AMD should've got their cooler sorted just as much as their hardware.

    BUT I don't know a single person with cash to burn who'd spend this much money on a GTX 590 because "it's quieter". You pay this amount of money for top-of-the-line performance, and that goes to the Radeon. I'd suggest that the noise-based decision is slightly off in this case.

    However, let's see what the OEMs do with custom coolers for both cards, particularly Asus strapping a 3-slot DirectCU II to the 6990 and Sapphire going 3-slot Toxic.

    Once the noise issue is addressed, I think this needs a rethink. Quadfire needs work too.


    I'd have to say though that this generation of GPUs is a bit of a disappointment. AMD building their tech hybrid for the 6000 series on 40nm has eaten away much of the amazing power and heat attributes that made the 5000 series so special, despite some good performance gains in certain cards. And even with the GF11x improvements, Fermi still runs hot and power hungry (although credit to Nvidia for wheeling out vapour chambers as standard to tackle it).


    Roll on Southern Islands and Kepler
  • 0 Hide
    david__t , 25 March 2011 19:02
    I am not biased either way, but the fact that AMD is anywhere near nVidia with a die size 20% smaller is amazing. This allows them to be far more profitable and is also why they can have higher clock speeds. At the end of the day though, both of these cards are merely marketing devices - they will only sell in tiny amounts and are only there for either company to claim the fastest 'Video Card' crown. In that respect they are nice technology projects for us to see, but most knowlegeable enthusiasts base their choices on research not marketing hype...
  • 1 Hide
    amstar , 26 March 2011 07:21
    Quote:
    Unless, say, AMD improve their drivers too /facepalm


    AMD? Improving drivers??

    :lol: 

    good luck with that. I almost never upgraded my ATI card (good old 2900XT) from release drivers because almost every subsequent one they put out making something run 1-3% faster, breaks compatibility or causes issues in something else.

    P.S. I also agree that I see no need for either the 6990 or the GTX 590 right now, instead I'd just get a GTX 580/6970 and possibly a GTS 450 for PhysX or go for an SLI/Crossfire build, as some games don't play nice with multi-GPU setups. This isn't 2006 or something where a decent SLI/Crossfire ready mobos cost £500+, people can get them pretty cheap these days.
  • 0 Hide
    shihabyooo , 26 March 2011 19:58
    Huh. No OC ? aaah well. It's better to stay on the safe side. Nvidia doesn't need another fried chip to worsen the situation...
  • 0 Hide
    vexun11 , 27 March 2011 17:24
    Go check out the benchmark review for AMD's drivers, it wasn't a huge upgrade but they have gotten slightly better.
  • 0 Hide
    Rab1d-BDGR , 27 March 2011 20:52
    Looks like "Thermi" has finally been tamed enough to put two chips near one another without starting fires. Well done to nVidia for that. I agree with the author that the only sensible (if that is the correct term) application of either card is in quad-GPU configuration... and hence will be a pretty niche part of the market.

    Let's see how Crysis 2 looks on these cards... I don't much care for the current crop of benchmarks - either they don't push the cards hard enough (battlefield) or they have pitifully low framerates with not much eye-candy to show for it (Metro - I swear there is something messed up with that engine!).
  • 0 Hide
    Gonemad , 1 April 2011 01:07
    I would still go for SLI / CF (insert single chip flagship here) than a card that tries to cram 6 billion transistors in 12 inches. The chips either get too hot, or underclocked or both.

    A couple of 580s doesn't sound madness when compared to each of these two cards. If you can splurge $700 on one 2-headed hydra, you can burn $1000 for 2-single-chip cards too.
  • -1 Hide
    ben BOys , 1 April 2011 02:35
    haha so only noise seperates the 2? i'm sorry but i'd rather save energy and money and wear headphones than Nvidia but dayum i wish i could have bth!
  • 0 Hide
    marney_5 , 19 April 2011 16:10
    The 6990 is a beast and almost £100 cheaper than the 590! bargain!

    I dont think I'd go with 2 of them though.
  • 0 Hide
    Anonymous , 20 May 2011 10:35
    Notice how the case is missing from the setup ! LOL.

    Gjee I wonder why....... (NOT).

    What a FAKE REVIEW.