Final words and conclusion
Final words and conclusion
Aaah yes, as if one card with two of the the worlds fastest GPUs is not fast enough we wanted to try out four GPUs.
GeForce GTX 590 in SLI -- four GPUs -- heck how do we justify that? Well, it's cool, funny and lovely to play around with but there's no way we can rationalize 1200 EUR for four GPUs to play some games on. As you have seen, scaling with four of the most high-end GPUs available is a difficult and daunting task.
Now one card with two GPUs, if properly supported scales extraordinary well. With 4 GPUs setup in SLI mode things simply get increasingly difficult, we often see with multi-GPU setups. In some games the performance of four GPUs is magnificent, in others 4-way multi GPU mode just does not kick in, and then in other scaling becomes an issue whether or not that is driver or CPU limitation related.
Good examples here where COD MWF2 and Anno 1404 where performance was actually lower than one card, hey it happens often with these two titles that GPU starts to blow after two GPUs. No biggy as the framerates remain exceptionally good.
Where the 4 GPUs did kick in, they kicked in well though. But you need to be at very high monitor resolutions, have extreme amounts of CPU horsepower and a fairly spicy power supply. Our system peaked to a power draw of roughly 900 Watt at one point -- which is a new record all by itself really. I am not so sure if we need to be proud of that though. Four way GPUs in SLI also meant much more noise pressure, as such we reached 44 dBa with the four GPUs stressed, slightly high but that's still quite acceptable.
Performance wise you will receive a product that oozes and chunks out ridiculous numbers in terms of frame rate. I mean we test at 4xAA / 8xAA and honestly, this card just does not care what you throw at it, it'll eat it alive with feathers and all, then it will spit out the bones and ask for more. Remember though to pair a card like this with an appropriate PC. Even our Core i7 Nehalem based quad core processor overclocked at 3750 MHz still will run into some CPU limitation with the somewhat aging games. By the way, CPU limitations / bottlenecks are not necessarily a bad thing. As long as you pass 60 FPS -- honestly who cares?
So with that much perf in-house, please do flick open all image quality settings a game offers you. I mean, if I take Battlefield 2 Bad Company, which is massively GPU dependant and enable all and only the very best image quality settings, apply 8xAA and we still get 154 FPS on average in a monitor resolution of 1920x1200 (!), well that just says it all really. That's pure, raw and unadulterated performance.
So regardless on what ridiculous amounts of money a setup like today costs, the experience is downright fun as always.
The x-factor of the GeForce GTX 590 is pretty extensive and the performance is unparalleled when that 2nd graphics card kicks in and if you like to go really wild with multiple-monitors then this product is starting to make a lot more sense. The industry also needs to kick out console ports and start writing games that need more brute graphical horsepower. The PC platform is made for pure image quality verses performance, and the heavier a game will be the better multi-GPU scaling will show off as well.
We'd like to thank Point of View for the two cards tested in today's articles, be sure to give them a visit right here. The GTX 590, well it's a top pick, I mean what else could this be.
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