ASUS NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 graphics card reviewed and rated

HEXUS bang4buck and bang4watt

Putting all the numbers into perspective, let's take a closer look at overall performance.

In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for buck, we've aggregated the 1,920x1,080 and 2,560x1,600 frame-rates for six games, normalised them* and taken account of the single-cards' prices.

But there are more provisos than we'd care to shake a stick at. We could have chosen six different games, the cards' prices could have been derived from other sources and pricing tends to fluctuate daily, especially for new-release GPUs.

Consequently, the table below highlight a metric that should only be used as a yardstick for evaluating comparative performance with price factored in. Other architectural benefits are not covered, obviously.

1,920x1,080

2,560x1,600

* the normalisation refers to taking playable frame rate into account. Should a card benchmark at over 60 frames per second in any one game, the extra fps count as half. Similarly, should a card benchmark lower, say at 40fps, we deduct half the difference from its average frame rate and the desired 60fps, giving it a HEXUS.bang4buck score of 30 marks. The minimum allowable frame rate is 20fps but that scores zero.

** the GPU power consumption is derived from subtracting a flat rate of 100W - indicating system power-draw without a card - from the Call of Duty: Black Ops load figure. While this figure isn't solely indicative of power pulled by the GPU, as the CPU also throttles up, it's a better metric than using peak system-draw alone.

*** the HEXUS.bang4watt score is a crude measurement of how much normalised performance the GPU provides when evaluated against GPU power-draw that's shown in the table: the former is divided by the latter. We're using the peak power-draw numbers obtained by running real-world Just Cause 2.

Analysis

That's a heck of a lot of numbers to digest. Let's take the 1,920x1,080 figures first. The close grouping of performance for the very best graphics setups indicates that testing at this resolution is fundamentally limited by the subsystem. A case in point is how close the Radeon 6950 XF and HD 6970 XF perform against one another. Really, a single Radeon HD 6950 or GeForce GTX 570 is good enough at this resolution.

What we really need to do is to zoom in on the 2,560x1,600 results, where the bottleneck is passed over to the GPU(s). Here, the Radeons' performance is hamstrung by a sub-par showing in StarCraft II, though they still put up a good fight overall.

In particular, the £410 combination of two Radeon HD 6950 2GB cards exceed the performance of the GTX 590 while consuming fewer watts. The Radeon HD 6990, too, is faster and has a higher bang4buck and bang4watt metrics to boot.