GeForce GTX 590 and Radeon HD 6990 Face Off

Vigile writes "Both NVIDIA and AMD have recently released new extreme-high-end graphics cards with dual-GPU configurations and PC Perspective has compared them to each other with some standard SLI/CrossFire comparisons for good measure. The GTX 590 is a pair of 512 shader processor GF110 GPUs which had the potential to be the fastest combination available, but the clock speeds were lowered to such a level that is has trouble keeping up with AMD's Radeon HD 6990. Sound levels were noticeably better on NVIDIA's option though the Radeon card provided better frame rates at the highest resolutions. So, while the $700 video card market just got a pair of new competitors, the best investment for that money might still be two less expensive Radeon or GeForce single-GPU cards."

Request for a new video card benchmark

[Dunbal]

While comparing video cards is all well and good, I make a formal nerd request that a decibel comparison be included in future reviews, say at idle fan speed, half maximum speed and full speed. Honestly it has gotten ridiculous - high end cards are just too damned loud. (switching to night-club mode) I MEAN WHAT IS THE POINT OF HAVING NICE GRAPHICS IF YOU CAN'T HEAR THE GAME YOU'RE PLAYING

Re:Hijacking the topic...

[drinkypoo]

Which 240 do you have, Coward? I have gigabyte's first 1GB model, which has a long and stupid name but it's the one with DDR3 and not DDR5. It was cheap and low-power.

Sadly, mine DOES NOT work reliably under Windows. Oddly, no matter WHAT video card I used I got a blue screen installing XP until recently. Without any BIOS update of video card or motherboard (the motherboard is gigabyte too, a GA-MA770-UD3P v1.0... I've looked up the info on that a lot more than the video card, so I know the name well) it just spontaneously worked the last time I tried... same XPSP3 installer CD even. I've tried the latest stable and beta drivers and I get lots of extra fail even playing games which target 9.0c specifically. I'm about to try 191.07, which is what you can download from gigabyte directly, to see if it is any better than 266.whatever, 260, etc...

Hilariously the card works great in Linux, AFAICT. Things were very stable in Maverick. Now I'm running Natty and it still seems good but I won't know for sure until I exercise it more. Simcity 4 in Wine 1.3 still works... Faster, if anything.

I just run whatever driver Ubuntu delivers me and it works a treat. But nothing I can download from nVidia delivers reliability on XP.

Perhaps Windows 7 is better-supported.

Drivers make the difference

[echusarcana]

ATI really needs to fix its drivers. This has been a problem for over a decade. Ridiculous performances is NOT important. Reliable drivers will always be. The difference in my case was 10fps with flakey bombouts (ATI) vs. 45 fps completely solid performance (nVidia).