AMD Radeon HD6990 vs nVidia GTX590

A short history lesson on dual GPU cards.

Most consumers don't even need dual GPUs with single GPUs more than enough for gaming purposes. However, some people like to be extreme, and dual GPU cards are the most extreme cards one can buy in the market. Right now we are looking at dual GF110 and dual "Caymans", essentially giving you two slowed down GTX580 or two HD6970 respectively.

SPECIFICATIONS

	GeForce GTX 590	GeForce GTX 580	Radeon HD 6990	Radeon HD 6970	Radeon HD 6950
Manufacturing Process	40 nm TSMC	40 nm TSMC	40 nm TSMC	40 nm TSMC	40 nm TSMC
Die Size	2 x 520 mm²	520 mm²	2 x 389 mm²	389 mm²	389 mm²
Transistors	2 x 3 billion	3 billion	2 x 2.64 billion	2.64 billion	2.64 billion
Engine Clock	607 MHz	772 MHz	830 MHz	880 MHz	800 MHz
Stream Processors / CUDA Cores	1024	512	3072	1536	1408
Compute Performance	2.49 TFLOPS	1.58 TFLOPS	5.1 TFLOPS	2.7 TFLOPS	2.25 TFLOPS
Texture Units	128	64	192	96	88
Texture Fillrate	77.7 Gtex/s	49.4 Gtex/s	159.4 Gtex/s	84.5 Gtex/s	70.4 Gtex/s
ROPs	96	48	64	32	32
Pixel Fillrate	58.3 Gpix/s	37.1 Gpix/s	53.1 Gpix/s	28.2 Gpix/s	25.6 Gpix/s
Frame Buffer	2 x 1.5 GB GDDR5	1.5 GB GDDR5	2 x 2 GB GDDR5	2 GB GDDR5	2 GB GDDR5
Memory Clock	853 MHz	1002 MHz	1250 MHz	1375 MHz	1250 MHz
Memory Bandwidth	2 x 163.9 GB/s (384-bit)	192 GB/s (384-bit)	2 x 160 GB/s (256-bit)	176 GB/s (256-bit)	160 GB/s (256-bit)
Maximum Board Power	365 W	244 W	375 W	250 W	200 W

With the current top single GPUs  being so powerful, things will only get better when doubled, right? Read more on the GTX590 and how well it performs in SLI vs the HD6990 in Crossfire here.

For the AMD HD6990 review, please click here now.


SOURCE: Tom's Hardware, Guru3d, Guru3d