StarCraft II
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is a sequel that improves on the original with an excellent campaign mode, incredible cut scenes and a multiplayer experience that never seems to grow old. Real-time-strategy games don't come much better than this.
| Percentage faster/slower than ASUS GTX 590 |
HD 6990 OC | HD 6990 | GTX 570 SLI |
|---|---|---|---|
| 18.5% | 19.5% | 2.9% |
Success for the GTX 590 at last. StarCraft 2 has a proclivity for running smoother on NVIDIA hardware. The results aren't totally consistent, as shown by how the Radeon HD 6990 leapfrogs the OC version. But we publish the numbers that are spat out by the test systems, not the numbers we expect to see.
Strangely, too, the numbers actually go up at 2,560x1,600. Go figure.
Performance summary
GeForce GTX 590's performance is lower than the Radeon HD 6990's across five of our six real-world games. In some games the difference is telling, to the tune of 25 per cent, and such clear performance disparities cannot be overlooked when in-game performance is, arguably, the most important factor for these ultra-high-end cards.
Though ASUS clocks its GTX 590 a few MHz higher than a bone-stock card, benchmark numbers show it to be very slightly slower in some games. The only plausible explanation we have for this lies with ASUS's custom BIOS tinkering with the memory timings. But still, the difference is so small that it barely registers on a graph, let alone when playing games.
