With AMD's Radeon HD 6990's arrival this week, the ball is in Nvidia's court to deliver a competitive alternative. The GeForce GTX 590 was expected to appear sometime last month but obviously that didn't happen. We haven't seen any release dates from Nvidia yet, but EXPreview has reportedly heard that the company's dual-GPU offering is slated for Tuesday, March 22 – the same day that Crysis 2 will land on North American store shelves.
Although its release date remains under wraps, some of the GTX 590's specifications have slipped out. According to a leak in January, the card will pack two GF110 graphics processor with a total of 1024 CUDA cores as well as 3027MB of GDDR5 memory, dual 384-bit memory buses, 128 texture units, 96 ROPs. The GTX 590 essentially doubles the hardware of Nvidia's current single-GF110 flagship, the GTX 580, except it will likely have lower clocks.
In other Nvidia news, the company has announced plans to host a special booth for PC gamers at PAX East 2011. The event kicks off on March 11 at Exhibit Hall A, Booth #524 and will let attendees experience today's "hottest" games (including some unreleased titles) in 3D and Nvidia 3D Vision Surround. Nvidia also plans to give away $20,000 worth of prizes along with showcasing various gaming PCs and upcoming Tegra handsets and tablets.