 Today I will be reviewing my Nvidia pen. It declares that you should insist on Nvidia, and it also has some other pretty good stuff on it. First of all, Nvidia is the number one choice in PCs and consumer electronics. Also all GeForce GPUs are Vista certified, shows you how old this pen is. And it is the number one choice for extreme gamers. And Nvidia defined the GPU category. Or at least they acquired, whoever did. Neat. Actually, that's not what we're doing today. Today we're going to be having a look at the GeForce GTX 590. This is going to be only one of my performance review videos of this particular card. I'm going to do a few. One of them is going to be all about 3D, 3D vision. So I'll only be comparing against other GeForce cards in that one. I'm going to be doing one heavyweight showdown between the GTX 590 and the Radeon HD 699. And that will actually be at a different resolution. So that one's going to be at 2560x1600 with this beast of a monitor right here. Okay, so that's my 30 inch monitor. But this one right here that you're watching is going to be all about 1080p performance. Now the GTX 590 and the 6990 for that matter are both a little bit overpowered for 1080p. So what you're going to see is that they will dominate the performance charts in all likelihood. But we're not going to see them really stretch their wings until you start to get into things like 3D for example, as well as HD plus resolutions like 2560x1600, what that 30 inch monitor uses. So I'm going to talk a little bit about my testing methodology. For most of these games I'm using 4X anti-aliasing at the max. I am running all of the games at extreme maximum settings except for Crisis. I turn motion blur to medium because it bothers me when it's any higher than that. I don't like playing the game that way so I just turn it off. Yeah, I think that's all there is to say. So we're going to be looking at Hawks 2, Lost Planet 2, Metro 2033, so that's Civilization 5. So those are some DirectX 11 titles for us. We've got Battlefield Bad Company 2, Far Cry 2, and Crisis to have a look at some DX 10 gaming. Any one of these GPUs is going to run any DirectX 9 title great. So I personally don't find it all that relevant. We're going to be looking at next gen features like Tessellation more than anything else. All of those DirectX 11 titles do support Tessellation in some way, shape, or form. So that's going to be an emphasis of what we're doing today. So in terms of the configurations we're looking at, this is going to be extreme performance stuff only. We're not going to be looking at any dinky stuff. So we've got the 590, the Radeon 6990. These are the two flagship $700 MSRP cards from Nvidia and AMD respectively. We're also going to be looking at GTX 580 SLI, which is another solution that gives you extreme performance on dual cards rather than on a single card because the two GTX 580s are clocked higher than the GPUs on the 590, but they have the drawback of consuming more power, kicking off more heat, and taking up four slots in your computer rather than only two. Okay, so there's that. And then we've also got a single 6970, a single GTX 580, and then I've also thrown in GTX 560 Ti SLI. So these two cards don't appear to match, but actually they do. And that is, it's just an interesting configuration because it's a pretty good value for a high end gaming system. And I just wanted to see how it stacks up against what is essentially a downclocked GF110 dual GPU solution versus a fully clocked GTX 560 Ti dual GPU solution. So stay tuned guys for charts and graphs. So one of the things I did not mention in my introduction was my test bench. I should probably cover that. So I've got a Core i7 2600K Sandy Bridge processor at 4.7 GHz. I've got 8 gigs of Mushkin Redline DDR3 1600 RAM. I've got an ASRock Fatality motherboard. I've got an Intel 510 series 120 gig SSD. And that's pretty much it for the relevant performance related stuff. So let's talk the overall results. So I'll go through the games individually. HOX 2 scales great. The CPU is able to allow pretty much any of these cards to reach their full potential and shows us how they all perform relative to each other to an extent. The Radeon cards don't perform nearly as well in HOX 2 as the GeForce cards. And that's an architectural thing. Could be driver related either way. They get left in the dust. They get creamed. Even the 6990 loses to GTX 560 SLI and a single GTX 580. So that's kind of an interesting thing about that. But it does allow us to show the relative performance of the GeForce solutions against each other at the very least. Lost Planet 2 is another one. It's a very demanding game. We are not CPU limited in any way in this particular title. So each of the GPUs is able to really stretch their wings and show us what it is capable of. So you see the 590 come out ahead of the 6990 in this particular game as well. Metro 2033 is another example of a game that all of the GPUs are able to perform quite well. The GTX 580 SLI actually performs about the same as the 6990, which means that the GTX 590, which doesn't perform as well as 580 SLI due to the lower clock speed, actually falls behind a little bit in that title. That's the first one, so I can't say as well. Battlefield Bad Company 2 is another one where we actually see pretty good scaling. And we also see fairly close, I would say this is pretty much a tie. Really close performance between the 590 and the 6990. So Civ 5, this one seems to be fairly CPU limited, although we do get a little bit of a performance increase with the 580. The anomaly here is the 560 SLI, which performs just as well as 580 SLI. I got no idea why that is, but I ran it again and again and again. So for my Civ 5 benchmark, basically I take a very, very late game, save game that I have from actually playing the game, and then I've got about 30 some odd cities on the screen, and then I zoom out all the way and I take a reading over a period of time and then average it out. So pretty much we're just looking at the same static image, we're centred over one of the cities, so each of the cards is rendering exactly the same thing, but that particular solution performs really well. It could be a driver thing that's preventing the single card solutions from performing as well as the dual card solutions. Not really sure what we're looking at there. For Far Cry 2, yeah, we're pretty much CPU limited at that point. We are not in any way GPU bound. Any one of these graphics cards is going to be able to give you a very good experience in Far Cry 2 if you actually still play that game. Crysis is another one. It looks like we are not going to be able to observe much in the way of scaling. The one that really falls behind in Far Cry 2 is the 6970, but the 6990 actually performs on top. It now performs even the GTX 580s. So at 1080p, it looks like for the most part, the 590 and the 6990 are going to be trading blows, so it's going to take our testing at 2560x1600 to really separate the men from the boys in this case. Remember, 2560x1600 is going to be an advantage for anyone who's got better multi-GPU scaling, whether it's Nvidia or AMD. It's also going to be an advantage for whoever has the most GPU power because you're going to be far less likely to run into CPU limitations at that kind of a resolution, but it should give AMD a distinct advantage because more resolution means you need more video RAM, and the 6990 actually has 4 gigs of RAM, 2 per GPU, whereas the 590 has 3 gigs of RAM, 1.5 gigs per GPU, so that may be a bit of an advantage. The only way to know is to try out some titles at that res. So thank you for checking out my video review of the GTX 590 at 1920x1080 1080p resolution. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.