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The GTX 590 vs. the HD 6990 – only One is “the World’s Fastest video card”

Posted on by Posted in ABTnews, Articles, News, Technology 25 Comments



Grand Theft Auto IV

Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV) is a sandbox-style action-adventure video game released by Rockstar in late 2008. It is the sixth game in the Grand Theft Auto series. Two episodic expansion packs have since been released since then as late as April of this year. The game is set in a redesigned rendition of Liberty City, a fictional city based heavily on modern day New York City. It follows Niko Bellic, a war veteran from Eastern Europe. He comes to the United States in search of the American Dream and enters a world of organized crime, gangs and corruption. GTA IV is mostly composed of elements from driving games and third-person shooters which features free-roaming gameplay. It features an online multiplayer mode, the first of the GTA series to do so. GTAIV2 300x187 The GTX 590 vs. the HD 6990 only One is the Worlds Fastest video card Here are the settings that we used. The 1.5GB GTX 480/570/580 and 2GB HD 69×0 Radeons, by virtue of having more than 1GB vRAM, can use even higher settings than the 1GB video cards (which are pictured below running nearly out of resources).  Unfortunately, HD 6970 CrossFire and HD 6990 did not even allow us to change any settings and we could not even make a clean exit.

GTAIV 2Settings The GTX 590 vs. the HD 6990 only One is the Worlds Fastest video card

First we test at 2560×1600 resolution.

gta 252 The GTX 590 vs. the HD 6990 only One is the Worlds Fastest video cardNow we test at 1920×1200.

gta 193 The GTX 590 vs. the HD 6990 only One is the Worlds Fastest video cardThis benchmark appears to be at the very least, highly CPU-limited at 1920×1200 except for our weakest cards which benefits from multi-GPU. At 2560×1600 we start to see some differences with some limited multi-GPU scaling.

In GTA-IV, the GTX 590 wins over the HD 6990 by default.  We used the latest AMD CrossFire profiles at the very beginning of this week and still the game refused to allow us to change settings.

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  • Ocre

    This review was so absolutely great. Miles above the Anand’s 10 games. I really really think you go above and beyond. One of the few places you can get a full review anymore. Such a great collection of data! Most sites do a handful of games and there is no way anyone could get a true picture. Most sites have diminished their launch articles to a point of incompleteness. Where one has to go somewhere else to get a full picture.

    Apoppin, i know its a lot of work for you, but i commend you for your dedication to all the data. Yours again is the most useful especially on a card that is so close in performance to the competitors. I cannot thank you enough for a fantastic article!

  • insurgent

    Very nice in-depth review, bookmarking the site now! Thank you for your hard work!

  • chris

    I love ABT reviews. They always seem to be pretty fair when it comes to in-depth testing. Keep up the good work guys. Really. I mean that. I plan to work for one of the many review sites when i finish my CE degree, and ABT is high on the list.

  • El_Member

    I’m impressed that Nvidia beat ATI in cooling with their dual GPU. It’s usually the opposite.

    It is nice to see the cost for both cards is about the same which gives more choices for the consumers to pick from.

    Nice Job!

  • El_Member

    Also a small note:

    When I click “View All” it doesn’t work, could you guys get it fixed?

  • http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?cat=3 apoppin

    Our web master is aware of this issue and is working on it.

    Thank-you all for your comments!

  • Jarrod

    The HD 6990 is honored under warranty by most vendors with the OC switch. So I’m quite puzzled why you OC’d the 590 and kept the 6990 the same.

  • http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?cat=3 apoppin

    If you want to see the HD 6990 tested with the BIOS position No. 2, please check out our HD 6990 launch article:
    http://alienbabeltech.com/main/introducing-the-worlds-fastest-graphics-card-amds-flagship-hd-6990
    The same settings were used and now you have both settings completely covered.

    You will also note in the Performance Summary of this GTX 580 launch article that we pitted our overclocked HD 6990 (960/1390MHz) against our overclocked GTX 580 (690/1825Mhz)

    I believe we covered all of the bases.

  • Jarrod

    You pointed out that bios switch 2 was tested in another review. But that does not answer why it was not tested in this review side by side with the 590(I hope that was not your answer as to why). Just saying it’s a bit weird you throw in a bunch of old games one being from 2005, but not test something most 6990 owners would be using.

  • http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?cat=3 apoppin

    BIOS position No. 2 was tested in the review immediately preceding this one and anyone can easily check the performance difference:

    http://alienbabeltech.com/main/introducing-the-worlds-fastest-graphics-card-amds-flagship-hd-6990

    The launch article about the GTX 590 tested the stock GTX 590 against the stock HD 6990. Then we tested the overclocked GTX 590 and the overclocked HD 6990 – both overclocked as far as they would go – the 6990 being overvolted in the BIOS No. 2 position and the GTX 590 at stock voltage.

    Including a third set of Radeon slightly-overclocked numbers would have cluttered the charts and taken precious extra time that was spent in benching. Especially because these figures are easily found in the previous article that were tested at the same settings and with the same drivers.

    We don’t “throw in” a bunch of old games at random. We have been following many of these games for nearly three years – when some were only a couple of years old and many top cards struggled with them – and our regular readers appreciate it. We also include a good mix of new games and are always adding more. Next added will be Bulletstorm and Shogun 2 and of course Crysis 2 when it fully debugged and running on the DX11 pathway.

  • Arjun

    magnificent review

  • http://www.sagebrushfire.com Sage

    This wasn’t a terrible review but it was definitely biased towards nVidia.

    In the Metro 2033 section you actually claim that the GTX 590 “Beats” the Radeon 6990 with 39.48 FPS vs. 39.2 FPS. You even used an exclaimation point!

    Comparisons within 3-6 FPS are inconclusive, let alone 0.3 FPS! Calling that any kind of defenative win is just absurd and proves you’re milking every possible edge the 590 might have.

    Don’t get me wrong; I’m using an nVidia card right now (Good ol’ GTX 460 SC) but I appreciate that both companies make stellar cards and it’s only fair to try and be unbiased as a reviewer since GPU consumers tend to be so polarized.

    Ultimately nVidia tends to have a slight performance edge and AMD tends to have a price edge. The only things that really make each company’s cards unique are special features like CUDA and Eyefinity.

  • Magnus

    I dont think the 590 or equivelent is such a big step from the card I have (the 480) for me really to be that excited.
    The step from 8800gtx to gtx480 was a really huge step tho (3x the improvement) like this is more like .5x the improvement, so I dont really give a shit.

    Sorry for mentioning all those nvidia cards, but its what I purchase, I work with CUDA for my gpgpu programming, so maybe even im a little biased, but opencl is what you use for amd cards, and its just as good.

  • Wind

    Way too many comparisons of other GPUs, it’s 590 vs 6990, remember? I was all confused with the color schemes on the graphs.

  • maniac

    I know quite a little about gfxcards so I didnt find answers why nVidia is better in some games and AMD in other games? Directx vs opengl? I play only Waw, BO, ET and Brink so I still dont know do I buy next 580, 590, 6970 or 6990. I have now 570 SLI but somehow my computer doesnt work well when SLI is on so single card is the solution. But which one?

  • http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?cat=3 apoppin

    I would highly recommend that you ask you question in our forum. You will get good information there and far more detail than from comments here.

    SLI should work well if you have a SLI MB. And there are many reasons why Nvidia is better in some games and AMD in others.

    http://alienbabeltech.com/abt/

  • Ryan

    Would it be possible to get a copy/screenshots of the current bios setting using during the tests?

  • Inamorta

    Wicked not biased review. Not.

  • najeeb

    what kind of a joke is this? , we are compareing over all proformance , why the HELL is phyx disabled ? , it is fair because its an official feature of nvidia , if amd does not have it , its not nvidias fault , we want an answer , it looked like u guys wanted nvidia to look slow or someting ?

  • http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?cat=3 apoppin

    There is no other way to compare performance directly.

    How many PhysX games are we comparing? Two out of nearly thirty games. Just ignore those results and look at the rest of the review. We test about 3 times more games than any other tech site.

  • Dreamwalker

    @najeeb what kind of joke are you on about? physx makes Nvidia cards slower in performance if turned on, if physx was on it’d be unfair to Nvidia right? In your case you should say “It actually seems like they’re trying to make Nvidia cards look faster than the AMD counterparts by disabling certain features.”

  • iminuru

    Wow that was extremely bias. Xbitlabs.com comparison was perfect.

  • Deckard Cain

    I just watched an youtube video comparing both cards and Radeon uses a lot less power from psu and gave a better or equal fps result than Nvidia. Others reviews compare both cards to be equivalent. I think this review is very outsiders and biased.

  • Soon Titlow

    Definitely appreciate you discussing this article. Great!!

  • diablo3

    I certainly enjoyed the way you explore your experience and knowledge of the subject! Keep up on it. Thanks for sharing the info!