Nvidia today officially released its new flagship card, the dual-GPU GeForce GTX 590. Launching a 2 weeks after AMD's latest flagship card, the Radeon HD 6990, NVIDIA is gunning for their spot at the top back. As we have previously mentioned, the GeForce GTX 590 is powered by two of the company's top-tier GF110 GPUs but it has turned down the clocks in order to make a power budget. In single card configurations the GF110 has been clocked at 772MHz in the GTX 580, but for the GTX 590 the clocks are down to 607MHz, while the functional unit count remains unchanged with everything enabled. Memory clocks have also been reduced to 853.5MHz (3414MHz data rate).

Compared to a GTX 570 core, each the GTX 590 GPUs feature less rasterization, shading/texturing and ROP capacity. However, the GTX 590 has a 384-bit memory bus, more memory bandwidth and L2 cache.

	GTX 590	GTX 580	GTX 570	GTX 560 Ti
Stream Processors	2 x 512	512	480	384
Texture Address / Filtering	2 x 64/64	64/64	60/60	64/64
ROPs	2 x 48	48	40	32
Core Clock	607MHz	772MHz	732MHz	822MHz
Shader Clock	1214MHz	1544MHz	1464MHz	1644MHz
Memory Clock	853MHz (3414MHz data rate) GDDR5	1002MHz (4008MHz data rate) GDDR5	950MHz (3800MHz data rate) GDDR5	1002Mhz (4008MHz data rate) GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	2 x 384-bit	384-bit	320-bit	256-bit
VRAM	2 x 1.5GB	1.5GB	1.25GB	1GB
FP64	1/8 FP32	1/8 FP32	1/8 FP32	1/12 FP32
Transistor Count	2 x 3B	3B	3B	1.95B
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 40nm
Price Point	$699	$499	$349	$249

The GTX 590 is rated for a TDP of 365W while rival's AMD Radeon HD 6990 is rated for 350W.

The card combines 1024 NVIDIA CUDA architecture cores, 3GB of GDDR5 memory, 6 billion transistors and over 2200 individual components packed into an 11 inch dual slot card, delivering 32 tessellation engines that can power today's DX11 games at resolutions of 2560x1600 and higher.



NVIDIA also engineered the GTX 590 to be quiet. It features a special cooling system and dual vapor chambers which deliver both performance and acoustics. Measured with a standard decibel meter, the GTX 590 clocks in at 48dB.

The card offers 3 DL-DVI ports along with a single mini-DP port. With four separate video outputs on each card, users can configure their PC with four independent displays, or they can span their gaming across 3 3D displays, at a resolution up to 5760x1080 utilizing NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround technology.

One of the features that GTX 590 brings is the ability to build powerful gaming rigs by combining two cards in a Quad SLI configuration.

NVIDIA is pricing the GTX 590 to be competitive with AMD's card. The MSRP of the GTX 590 will be $699, the same as where the 6990 launched 2 weeks ago.