GeForce GTX 590 review

In GPU land, competition is everything and somewhere down the line somebody decided to place more than one GPU in a graphics card, to beat the competition. Yes yes, hey everybody, welcome to yet another dual-GPU product review. Merely two weeks ago ATI unleashed their Radeon HD 6990, and NVIDIA sat back relaxed and decided to release their product a little later, close to the release of Crysis 2.

It's now late March 2011 and both graphics gawds have released their most high-end product available. Again let me say it, March 2011, the timing is so weird as typically the most high-end product are release slightly prior to the Christmas season, to take full advantage of the extra cash you guys are willing to spend on the best of the best, as hey it's the holiday season. But yeah, the graphics industry has changed, is changing and will keep changing alongside the product releases.

Today the GeForce GTX 590 is released. Pretty much NVIDIA in a nutshell, took two of their best GPUs, placed it onto one card, topped it off with a very nice cooler and calls that a single solution graphics card. Internally on that card however a small NF200 chip functions as PCI Express bridge in-between the two GPUs and sure, that means SLI in full effect.

The release today however is very interesting, it's one the most silent multi-GPU solution we have ever had our hands on, the performance really is breathtaking and the power consumption, though high, remains acceptable.

The products reviewed today originate from Point of View, they are one of the five board-partners in Europe to be allowed to sell these products. And whatever you decide to purchase or not, keep in mind that today's launch might be a hard launch with cards in store, yet the reality will be that very few boards will be available in the first wave. In fact we expect less than 2000 board being available for the entire Europe.

Anyway, have a peek at the awesomeness that is the GeForce GTX 590, and then head on over to the next page where as always, we'll go a little deeper, but not too deep. We'll look at noise levels, power consumption, heat, we'll do a nice photo-shoot and heck why not... an extensive benchmark session to see where this product positions itself, especially compared to the Radeon HD 6990.

The Product Architecture

It isn't exactly a secret anymore what the GTX 590 exactly is, in very short words it is one graphics card made out of two graphics processors. Internally they are connected through a PCIe connection (on board) and then they operate in SLI mode. To accomplish something really sturdy and powerful, NVIDIA took their fastest GPUs available and without any compromises on the number of shader processors etc inside that GPU they started designing the card.

The end result is a dual-GPU product that runs two ICs called and tagged as the GF110, the very same stuff you find in the GeForce GTX 580, and in it's bare essence the GTX590 is in fact two 580'ies albeit clocked slower.

So that's two GF110 GPUs on a single graphics card connected through a NF200 bridge chip with a total of 1024 Shader processors for both GPUs and 3 GB of GDDR5 memory, all that on a 12-layer 11" PCB. The GPUs each get 10 power phases. Cooling wise NVIDIA extends the vapor-chamber cooling, yet now they make use of a dual-radiator design.

So yeah, it is hard to realize that the 9th of November last year these GPUs where released, this is how fast the product cycle is updated these days.

The new Dual-GPU solution is of course DirectX 11 ready. With Windows 7 and Vista also being DX11 ready all we need are some games to take advantage of DirectCompute, multi-threading, hardware tessellation and new shader 5.0 extensions. DX11 is going to be good and once tessellation kicks into games, better looking.

• GeForce GTX 590 : 1024 SP, 384-bit (2x), 365W TDP
• GeForce GTX 580 : 512 SP, 384-bit, 243W TDP
• GeForce GTX 480 : 480 SP, 384-bit, 250W TDP
• GeForce GTX 470 : 448 SP, 320-bit, 225W TDP

The GPU that empowers it all has small architectural changes compared to the initial GTX 480 FERMI design (which GF110 is based of), some stuff was stripped away and some additional functional units for tessellation, shading and texturing have been added. Make note that the GPU still is big, as the fabrication node is still 40nm. TSMC canceled the 32nm fab node preventing this chip from being smaller.

The two GF110 graphics processors have sixteen shader clusters embedded in them (called SMs) bringing a full 512 shader processors per GPU.

To keep TDP, power consumption and noise levels at really acceptable values, NVIDIA did keep the clock frequency and thus voltage lower than that GTX 580. That's 607 MHz on the graphics processors and 3414 MHz (effective data-rate) on the GDDR5 memory. But that will still chunk out ridiculous performance numbers of course.

	GeForce 9800 GTX	GeForce GTX 285	GeForce GTX 295	GeForce GTX 480	GeForce GTX 580	GeForce GTX 590
Stream (Shader) Processors	128	240	240 x2	480	512	1024
Core Clock (MHz)	675	648	576	700	772	607
Shader Clock (MHz)	1675	1476	1242	1400	1544	1215
Memory Clock (effective MHz)	2200	2400	2000	3700	4000	3414
Memory amount	512 MB	1024 MB	1792 MB	1536	1536	3072
Memory Interface	256-bit	512-bit	448-bit x2	384-bit	384-bit	384-bit
Memory Type	GDDR2	GDDR3	GDDR3	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5
HDCP	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Two Dual link DVI	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
HDMI	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	No

Memory wise NVIDIA has sizable and expensive memory volumes due to their architecture, we pass 1 GB per GPU as standard these days for most of NVIDIA's series 500 graphics cards. Each memory partition utilizes one memory controller on the respective GPU, which will get 256MB of memory tied to it.

• The GTX 590 has six (x2) memory controllers (12x256MB) = 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory
• The GTX 580 has six memory controllers (6x256MB) = 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory

As you can understand, the memory partitions, bus-width and combination of GDDR5 memory (quad data rate) allow the GPU to work with a high framebuffer bandwidth (effective). Let's put most of the data in a chart to get an idea and overview of some specific changes:

Graphics card	GeForce GTX 470	GeForce GTX 480	GeForce GTX 580	GeForce GTX 590
Fabrication node	40nm	40nm	40nm	40nm
Shader processors	448	480	512	1024
Streaming Multiprocessors (SM)	14	15	16	32
Texture Units	56	60	64	128
ROP units	40	48	48	96
Graphics Clock (Core)	607 MHz	700 MHz	772 MHz	607 MHz
Shader Processor Clock	1215 MHz	1401 MHz	1544 MHz	1215 MHz
Memory Clock / Data rate MHz	837 / 3348	924 / 3696	1000 / 4000	854 / 3414
Graphics memory	1280 MB	1536 MB	1536 MB	3072 MB
Memory interface	320-bit	384-bit	384-bit	384-bit
Memory bandwidth	134 GB/s	177 GB/s	192 GB/s	164 GB/s per GPU
Power connectors	2x6-pin PEG	1x6-pin PEG, 1x8-pin PEG	1x6-pin PEG, 1x8-pin PEG	2x8-pin PEG
Max board power (TDP)	215 Watts	250 Watts	244 Watts	365 Watts
Recommended Power supply	550 Watts	600 Watts	600 Watts	700 Watts
GPU Thermal Threshold	105 degrees C	105 degrees C	97 degrees C	97 degrees C

So we talked about the core clocks, specifications and memory partitions. Obviously there's a lot more to talk through. Now, at the end of the pipeline we run into the ROP (Raster Operation) engine and each GF110 GPU has 48 units for features like pixel blending and AA. There's a total of 64 texture filtering units per GPU available for the GeForce GTX 590. The math is simple here, each SM has four texture units tied to it.

• GeForce GTX 580 has (16 SMs X 4 Texture units) = 64 x 2 = 128 TUs
• GeForce GTX 580 has 16 SMs X 4 Texture units = 64 TUs

Though still a 40nm based chip, the GF110 GPU comes with almost 3 billion transistors embedded into it. So that's 6 billion transistors active in your PC -- so if the Sims still doesn't run smooth... I dunno what would do the job ;)

The TDP is roughly 365 Watt, a very respectable number really. TDP = Thermal Design Power. Roughly translated, when you stress everything on the graphics card 100%, your maximum power consumption is the TDP.

The GeForce GTX 590 comes with both two 8-pin power connectors to get enough current and still have some for overclocking.