The GTX 590 has been a long time in the making. The last dual-GPU card that Nvidia formally released was the GTX 295 back in late 2008. The new 'Fermi' GF100 core introduced in the GTX 480 series was almost a year ago now, and it was Nvidia's biggest change in architecture and performance since the much-loved G80 core (i.e. 8800GTX). Fermi was notoriously power hungry and hot running, with traditional dual-slot coolers being pushed to the limit to cope with the energy dissipation. Things have changed however. The GTX 580 made an appearance in November 2010 with the revised and updated Fermi core, the GF110. The new core still has a high power draw, and enthusiasts have had to wait until now to find out whether Nvidia will be able to cram two of these Fermi GPUs onto one card.
The GTX 590 is set to take on AMD's Radeon HD 6990 for the single card performance crown. It's widely believed now that the GTX 590 will use two GF110 cores with all stream processors enabled. This looks like it will be achieved using lower frequencies in the GPU core to accommodate a reasonable power draw for a single card. That said, it will most likely be the most power hungry GPU ever released to the consumer market. Should the rumoured specifications be correct, the GTX 590 should outperform the AMD Radeon HD 6990, though this is really only a competition for bragging rights. Price and availability will determine success in this market, with the HD 6990 slipping down towards the £500 mark, the GTX 590 is likely to be more than £100 more expensive, though there is no official word on pricing as yet.
Nvidia's video is shown below:
Source: Anandtech
In related news, there has also been a leak of information about the GTX 590 as well as several images, which show the card, performance figures and specifications.
The proposed specifications reinforce the above opinion:
Agency from Guangzhou King Fung
Gigabyte GTX590 will arrive tomorrow arrival
Estimated model is: GV-N590D5-3GD-B
Graphics parameters:
Memory: 3072MB (single is the 1530M)
Width: 768BIT
Stream Processors: 1024 (single 512)
Core frequency: 607MHZ
Memory frequency: 3414MHZ
Support for Quad SLI
Power: 365W
Two external power 8PIN
Gigabyte GTX590 will arrive tomorrow arrival
Estimated model is: GV-N590D5-3GD-B
Graphics parameters:
Memory: 3072MB (single is the 1530M)
Width: 768BIT
Stream Processors: 1024 (single 512)
Core frequency: 607MHZ
Memory frequency: 3414MHZ
Support for Quad SLI
Power: 365W
Two external power 8PIN
The leaked images show an ASUS card and also a lot of information on a Gigabyte variant. Have a look for yourself:
Stock press shots show the cooler design and packaging
An ASUS card in packaging
Synthetic benchmarks favour the GTX 590 over the HD 6990 by some way. They also show the GTX 580 outperforming the HD 6990 in one test.
Game benchmarks show a mixed bag - the overclocked HD 6990 beats the GTX 590 in 2/7 tests, somewhat unexpectedly
There will be more information on the GTX 590 very soon, the expected release is 24/3/11, just two days from now.
Source: Overclock.net
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