In a rare display of public displeasure, AMD is taking Nvidia to task over a recent Nvidia press release that touts the alleged supremacy of the company's new GeForce GTX 590 graphics card. These battles between the "big two" graphics card manufacturers are most often held across the immeasurable number of reviews sites that run an endless series of benchmarks to sort out winning hardware from duds.In this case, the squabble shapes up something like this: AMD launched its flagship GPU, the AMD Radeon HD 6990, approximately two weeks ago. As is typical, this announcement was heralded with a press release that described the card as follows: "AMD today announced the launch of the fastest graphics card in the world, the AMD Radeon HD 6990, packing so much raw performance it delivered a new single graphics card world record score of P11865 in the industry standard 3DMark11 benchmark."
Flash forward to Nvidia's March 24 announcement, where it described its latest GeForce GTX 590 cardas "the fastest dual graphics card available today which also happens to be the world's quietest too."
Upon reading the Nvidia release, a senior public relations manager at AMD took to the company's official blog to lay into its chief competitor.
"We combed through their announcement to understand how it was that such a claim could be made and why there was no substantiation based on industry-standard benchmarks," wrote Dave Erskine, the aforementioned senior public relations manager.
"So now I issue a challenge to our competitor: prove it, don't just say it. Show us the substantiation. Because as it stands today, leading reviewers agree with us […] that the AMD Radeon HD 6990 sits on the top as the world's fastest graphics card," he added.
So, who's right? As always, that depends on who you ask. Or, in this case, what benchmarks you run. PCMag has formulated our own opinion on which graphics processor reigns supreme based on our own testing patterns and other factors that weigh into our overall analysis. Speaking to benchmarking in general, Anandtech's Ryan Smith correctly noted that the performance of a video card can vary wildly depending on how it's being tested.
"The crux of the matter is that Nvidia and AMD have significantly different architectures, and once again this has resulted in cards that are quite equal on average but are all over the place in individual games and applications," wrote Smith.
"Thus choosing the most appropriate card is heavily reliant what games are going to be played on it, and as a result there is no one card that can be crowned king," he added.
Given the omission in Nvidia's press release, one can presume that Nvidia's GTX 590 gets smoked on 3DMark11 tests—an analysis by Legit Reviews, amongst others, confirmed this fact. But just as it's incorrect for Nvidia to state that it has the world's fastest graphics card sans attribution, so is it equally incorrect for AMD to call Nvidia to the carpet based on the performance of a single benchmark in which - go figure - AMD's card excels.
"The point of this blog is not about who's the fastest; the point is that our competitor made a public claim in a press release that had no substantiation," Erskine later wrote in a response to a comment on his post.
Nvidia representatives have not released an official statement on the matter.
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