Reviewed by Marcus ‘The Sloth’ Maximus – Hardware Editor for The Game Druid

Let’s get right to the review without mincing words. You’re wondering why we’re reviewing this card now since it’s been out for the last 5 odd months? Because I’m The Sloth; and I’ll do whatever I damn please – when I want and where I want.

Sorry…I digress. Anyway…on to the review.

First and foremost – If you’re looking for a card to run on your piss poor, sub-par full HD and by Full HD I mean 1080p, no…1050 is NOT full HD or not almost full HD; and beyond…you shouldn’t even consider this card. Also if you’re thinking that you’ll be cool by getting this card and get laid more often…you probably wont. But you will have bragging rights…Not for getting laid. Get your mind out of the gutter!

again….I digress.

So yeah, Full HD and beyond – with multiple monitors and cash to blow – this card is for you. $700+ you’re not going to regret it. I did some checking and in India (for all my Indian fans) this is about INR 34,000 – 38,000. Yeah. It’s expensive.

Following closely on the AMD Radeon 6990, the GTX 590 comprises two modified GPUs – in this case the GTX 580– soldered onto a real slab of a circuit board. Nvidia has tweaked clock speeds to fit: the 772MHz cores have been reined in to 607MHz, the 1,544MHz shader clock to 1,224MHz, and the combined 3GB of GDDR5 memory from 4,008MHz to 3,420MHz. Nvidia has retained its familiar stream processor architecture, with 32 clusters across both cores, each containing 32 stream processors. It’s a proven system but, when stacked against the HD 6990, sounds relatively weak: AMD’s card contains 3,072 stream processors alongside 5.2 billion transistors, with the GTX 590 offering 1,024 processors and “just” 3 billion transistors.

According to various benchmarks – The Nvidia card lagged slightly behind in the less demanding benchmarks. An average of 60fps in a 1,920 x 1,080 Very High quality Crysis test with 8x anti-aliasing is 3fps slower than the HD 6990, and this pattern was repeated in the equivalent Just Cause 2 test, where the Nvidia card scored 90fps to the AMD chip’s 96fps.

But when we really cranked up the settings to enthusiast levels – aided by a triple-monitor setup with a resolution of 5,760 x 1,080 – the GTX 590 showed its strength. It averaged a playable 32fps in the Very High Crysis benchmark at this extreme resolution; the HD 6990 managed 30fps. Adding 8x anti-aliasing widened the gap: the GTX 590’s 23fps average was a massive 10fps quicker than the struggling HD 6990.

Want a graphics card that delivers pure media acceleration without giving 2 cents to gaming? Then you’re prayers have been answered thanks to the ATI Radeon 5450. Here’s the low down:

For $50 (~INR 2500) – You get a DX 11 card, with Eyefinity, UVD2 and HDMI support! To add to it… It’s built on a 40nm die, with a core clock speed of 650MHz and only 80 stream processors. What does this mean? It’s a tiny card, passive cooled, media powerhouse. It has just 12 gigs of memory bandwidth, but 104 GFLOPS of compute performance! Most of the latest onboard graphics cards rate at 40 to 50 GFLOPS – do the math.

Here are the specs:

Here’s what the card looks like:

Here’s a little snippet from the Legit Reviews guys:

Adding the Radeon HD 5450 to the test system (AMD X2) added about 7W to the idle numbers, but actually saved 14W of power during movie playback since it didn’t use as much of the CPU during Blu-ray playback.

The bottom Line:

The ATI Radeon HD 5450 might be the best HTPC graphics card ever made. For less then $60 – you get flawless blu-ray playback with DTS-HD Master Audio bitstreaming!

Stand aside 4870s, the ATI Radeon HD 4890 is here!! The HD 4890 card with 1GB GDDR5 memory is expected to give 124.8 GB/s of memory bandwidth, but the memory interface used for the same hasn’t been confirmed yet. We’re assuming that ATI incorporated a 256-bit memory interface for wider memory bandwidth.

New drivers to unleash the potential of this RV790 chip are expected to wipe out the fuss after the recent benchmarks leak. In terms of pricing, AMD will be priced way far below Nvidia’s high-end GTX 280 graphics card and obviously a bit higher than their existing HD 4870.

The ATI Radeon HD 4890 specs are as follows:

- GPU: RV790 @ 850MHz / 40nm
- Memory: 1024Mb GDDR5 @ 3900MHz
- Shader Processors: 800

Release date: April 6th 2009.

But guess what? ATI has confirmed that when the 4890 launches, the prices for the 4850 and 4870, single and X2 variants will not drop.Having said that, I’d give it a few months depending on how nVidia’s new cards perform and their strategy.

The big question is, how much faster will it be in real world gaming benchmarks, I don’t even look at synthetic tests. April 6th, thy name is ‘too fking far and I can’t wait’.