Being the vendor behind the fastest graphics card money can buy means a lot for both NVIDIA and AMD, in equal measures, as neither is willing to just accept the second best spot while trying to spin off their mediocrity with performance and/or features to price. NVIDIA has been a company traditionally seen as being behind the fastest GPU's for longer periods of time, and with higher standards in product quality. Its GeForce GTX 580 single GPU was very fast, but its competition was inconclusive with the Radeon HD 5970 card, the red team lead extended with the launch of the Radeon HD 6990 a couple of weeks earlier, but now NVIDIA got the GeForce GTX 590 fully ready to go up against in full battle mode. - techPowerUp

ASUS GeForce GTX 590 3GB Dual-GPU Board Review

We in the media had written off the possibility of a dual Fermi graphics card, using two GF100 cores after seeing the GeForce GTX 480's obnoxious thermal figures. Their GF110 is however worlds apart from GF100 in terms of thermal and electrical characteristics, but even that left a bit of a doubt if NVIDIA can actually pull of an dual GPU graphics card based on it, let alone a single PCB design. Well, NVIDIA's engineers shut us up with their GeForce GTX 590. But that's only a part of the story. We have today with us a GeForce GTX 590 by ASUS, which sticks to the reference, and combines it with ASUS' high quality packaging.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 is one of the longest graphics cards on the market today which requires two slots in your system. The card has three DVI ports and one mini DisplayPort. Due to their dual GPU design, you can use all outputs at the same time. However, AMD offers an rather more complex and flexible output configurations on their GPU's, where up to six active outputs are possible. You may combine up to two GeForce GTX 590 cards within an SLI config. Their new revision also brings support for Blu-ray 3D movies which will become important later this year when we will see those first Blu-ray 3D titles shipping.

NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 590 sets out to conquer the dual GPU performance throne. It battles AMD's Radeon HD 6990 that was released just two weeks ago. Designing these kind of graphics card means you are limited by power and heat instead of by the raw power of your GPU design. Basically you are deciding on the power input configuration, two 8-pin in this case, which means their board is specified to draw a maximum of 375W of power. Then you find a thermal solution that can move that kind of heat away from the card. In the next step you build the board and tune the clock speeds and voltage to fit into those limitations.

As a result the GeForce GTX 590 and Radeon HD 6990 are roughly at the same performance when averaged. In the lower resolutions GeForce GTX 590 wins and ultra widescreen the Radeon HD 6990 wins slighly. Since this ultra widescreen is the primary resolution that both of those cards should be used for, our conclusion is that the GeForce GTX 590 is slower but not by much. It is still disappointing to see that NVIDIA could not turn their single GPU winning GF110 into a dual GPU design win too. While we usually do not believe in large gains from newer drivers, this time we are not so sure as it all depends on the power algorithm.

Price wise both the Raden HD 6990 and GeForce GTX 590 are tied around $700 which is a lot of money to spend on a graphics card. Our recommendation would be to go with a single GPU version such as the GeForce GTX 580 and wait what the future brings in terms of games. Now most games are console ports, Crysis 2 is DirectX 9.0c meaning developers the PC scene needs more love from you.