[Shaw Champ]

Spring 2011 upgrade time. I want to move from my current GTX 480 brought this time last year.

The GTX 590 is supposed to be previewed this weekend at PAX East, and the 6990 just came out. Both are dual GPU cards.

If you could which would you get and why?

 

[DavidT]

The 6990, because it's the only of the two available right now.

There are no official specs, benchmarks or pricing of the GTX 590 yet. Until that information is available, any votes for either/or would be based on pure fanboyism.

 

[BGY11]

What size and how many monitors do you have? If you only have one display and it's smaller than 30" I'd say neither card. Paying over $700 for a graphics card in that case wouldn't be worth it.

If you really feel an upgrade is needed and your motherboard supports SLI then I'd say get another GTX 480. Cheaper option that would give you NV Surround support.

 

[Shaw Champ]

I have a 28" monitor at 1920x1200. Motherboard is an EVGA X58 Classified supporting SLi at full x16 bandwith.

I play a lot of games and desire above 60fps. I also use Adobe After Effects quite a lot. Currently the CUDA with my Nvidia card means After Effects is a lot faster in rendering.

My desk space is limited so I will not be adding a second monitor. But I do need the raw power. I am finding over the past year in owning my GTX 480 that I could do with some more 'beef' in some of the things I do.

I have a pretty good case and well ventilated but I think dual 480's would put to much heat out as they are hot to begin with. The idea of having a 2 in 1 card sounds good now. Previous I had a HD4870x2 and have had 2xGTX285's in SLi.

I was reading the Nvidia card comes March 22nd now apparently. This time last year in Canada I couldn't find a 5970 for sale so went with the GTX 480 that was available. I guess I will wait for the reviews on the Nvidia card to come through.

 

[hugh]

I doubt the upgrade would make a huge difference on gaming performances since most high end cards from last year still provide excellent performance at 1920 x 1080. The upgraded GPU's are desirable in higher resolutions or multiple monitor situation. I always recommend checking out Toms Hardware as they have the best GPU for the money feature every month.

Regarding your desire to improve performance with Adobe After Effects and rendering, are you certain the bottleneck is the GPU and not the CPU or Memory?

 

[Cockroach]

I need to UG my video card too. Not for games but for processing RAW files and viewing the changes quickly.

My RAW converter of choice, Capture ONE, uses the GPU under Open GL (or the Microsft equivalent).

Unfortunately it'd appear a actively cooled card is required.

 

[Shaw Champ]

@Hugh I don't have any bottleneck with After Effects it is just coded to work better with Nvidia cards. I should of mentioned I have 12gb ram and an i7-930 CPU at 4.2ghz. I am concerned that if I choose a 6990 card from AMD that I would also loose the rendering speed gains I currently enjoy in After Effects. I agree Toms is a good read too, the latest Nvidia card should be out on Thursday now From a gaming perspective with some of the latest games I am still finding a challenge getting good frame rates with all the bells and whistles on at 19x12 rez.

 

[hugh]

Not sure if you are referring to CUDA but this from an Adobe employee "CUDA is only on Nvidia cards. After Effects doesn't use CUDA; Premiere Pro does."

 

[Shaw Champ]

Yes sorry Hugh, you are right I got a little confused with AE. I use some plugins for AE that are better supported but AE itself as standard package doesn't. I have the CS5 suite with PP and that is where I remember reading in the documentation supporting CUDA plus also at toms: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/adobe-cs5-cuda-64-bit,2770.html Within AE and PP I used a lot of Photoshop CS5 now too with plugins supporting CUDA.


Well the GTX590 is out looks to be about even with the AMD 6990 in games with one being the better than the other taking it in turns. Price is about the same, the 6990 is a louder card but there has been reports of issues with the drivers for the GTX590 causing some reviewers cards to fail. May have to go 2 separate cards for better performance now.