Ding, ding, final round
The machinations of AMD and NVIDIA always make for an interesting opinion piece or two. Now, though, significant product commonality between the two companies is limited to consumer and professional graphics cards.
Competition between AMD and NVIDIA is fierce at all price points, and both engage in an approach that peppers each segment with overlapping products. But there can only be one product right at the top of the stack - the halo card - and with the AMD Radeon HD 6990 4GB already unveiled, to be followed next week by NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 590, we'll soon know who's going to be enjoying bragging rights for months to come.
We know all about the Radeon
The Radeon HD 6990 4GB is a known quantity; you can find benchmarks for it right over here. The chief Radeon makes the most of AMD's dual-GPU know-how by accommodating two top-binned Cayman-class GPUs, though both are clocked in at slightly lower than single-GPU Radeon HD 6970 speeds. The net result of this silicon finagling is a card that's mighty fast and extremely power-hungry. Heck, it's slapped with a 375W TDP in default mode, rising to a toe-curling 450W in OC guise.
Now, NVIDIA knows a thing or two about making big-die GPUs that seemingly focus on speed above all else. The current king of the crop is the GeForce GTX 580. It is fast, clever in design, and, arguably, the fastest single-GPU card ever made for gamers. In fact, our benchmarks show that the twin-GPU Radeon HD 6990 is 'only' 40 per cent faster when evaluated across a wide range of benchmarks.
GTX 590 has to be faster, right?
So it's a shoo-in that the also-twin-GPU GeForce GTX 590 is going to relieve itself all over the Radeon HD 6990? I don't think that's entirely so, and here's why.
First off, at the time of writing, I'm not privy to official specifications or bound by any NDAs from NVIDIA. I'm simply taking an educated guess on what we may see next week, assuming the rumour mill's launch date of March 22 is correct.
NVIDIA's big-die approach to designing modern graphics cards backfired somewhat with the GeForce GTX 480, released a year ago. The GTX 580 is better, absolutely, but it's merely the 480 with most of the kinks ironed out. NVIDIA has to go with two GTX 580-class chips on one board if it's to wrestle the crown away from AMD with the GTX 590, yet taking the foot-to-the-floor wattage into account, some 250W for a single GPU, the two GF110s can't be running at full GTX 580 speeds of 772MHz core and 4,008MHz memory.
Fewer watts, more features...probably
You see, I think NVIDIA is very wary of creating a monster-wattage card, especially as its power-restricting technology doesn't appear to be as robust as AMD's. A 450W GTX 590? I don't see that happening. Rather, NVIDIA will do what AMD has done, that is, take the very finest GF110 chips, screened for low-voltage operation, and stick them on 590 boards.
I'm assuming NVIDIA will want to keep at, or below, the Radeon HD 6990's basic 375W power-draw. Looking into my crystal ball and scaling down the GF110s for power reasons, this means the GTX 590 GPUs should be running at 600MHz, maybe a little more if the screening process realises unusually good chips. Put those together, stick one some 3.6GHz-rated memory and you have a card that should benchmark at a level which falls just below the fastest speed available on the big-ass Radeon HD 6990. That's my guess, anyhow.
Going along with this rooted-in-conjecture rationale, NVIDIA may promote the GTX 590's relative quietness and reportedly smaller form factor as reasons to own its super-duper card. Don't be surprised if NVIDIA, too, focuses on newer features than on straight-line speed. Should this come to pass it would represent a neat about-turn from the hot, noisy, extremely power-hungry GTX 480 GPU: imagine two of those running full chat on one board!
Does it matter?
Does NVIDIA really care if it has the fastest consumer graphics card in the world? I don't think so, folks, because its loyal horde of sycophants eager devotees will gobble up the rumoured worldwide allocation of 1,000 units with nary a concern for performance. NVIDIA could even price them at £699 and they'd sell.
But I'm acutely aware that any predictions are tempered by the knowledge that NVIDIA could release the GTX 590 with a driver that, miraculously, increases across-the-board performance by 25 per cent over the current WHQL set. It's not like AMD hasn't found a boatload of extra perf from the Catalyst 11.4 drivers.
Do you think NVIDIA's GTX 590 will spank the Radeon HD 6990? Am I barking mad? (don't answer that). Let me know your thoughts in the forums.
