14 DAY TRIAL // Not to be outdone by AMD with its Radeon HD 6990, Nvidia will also release a dual-GPU graphics card, called the GTX 590, in the next month, but recent reports claim that availability will be somehow limited as only Asus and EVGA will offer the card in the North American market.
It is still unclear why this is the case, but Tom's Hardware says this situation was confirmed by sources close to Nvidia.
EVGA has already showcased at CES 2011 a video card that was presumably the Nvidia GeForce GTX 590 and, although the company didn't want to make official any additional details, their creation was clearly sporting dual Nvidia GPUs, as the back of its printed circuit board revealed.
As far as Asus is concerned, the company hasn't released any pictures of a graphics card that would look like the GTX 590, but the company has a vast experience with such solutions as it has previously released two of the most advanced dual-GPU cards of their time, the dual GTX 285 Mars and the Radeon HD 5970-based Ares.
The GTX 590 is built using dual GF110 graphics cores (the same cores used for the GTX 580 and GTX 570) that are installed on the same printed circuit board (PCB) and setup to work in SLI.
These will be hand picked by Nvidia so that only the most power efficient cores will be used and the card could pack as much as 1024 stream processors, 128 texturing units, 96 ROPs as well as dual 384-bit memory interfaces.
In addition, the GeForce GTX 590 will also feature 3072MB of GDDR5 video buffer.
Nvidia's dual-GPU solution is rumored to be launched during the PAX East 2011 gamer festival, that will be held between March 11 and March 13 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, in Boston, Massachusetts.