NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Review: Retaking The Performance Crown
by Ryan Smith on March 22, 2012 9:00 AM ESTCrysis: Warhead
Kicking things off as always is Crysis: Warhead. It’s no longer the toughest game in our benchmark suite, but it’s still a technically complex game that has proven to be a very consistent benchmark. Thus even four years since the release of the original Crysis, “but can it run Crysis?” is still an important question, and the answer continues to be “no.” While we’re closer than ever, full Enthusiast settings at a 60fps is still beyond the grasp of a single-GPU card.
While Crysis was a strong game for the GTX 580, the same cannot be said of the GTX 680. NVIDIA is off to a very poor start here, with the Radeon HD 7970 easily outperforming the GTX 680, and even the 7950 is tied or nearly tied with the GTX 680 depending on the resolution. On the bright side the GTX 680 does manage to outperform the GTX 580, but only by a relatively meager 17%.
Given the large gap in theoretical performance between the GTX 680 and GTX 580, as it turns out we’ve run into one of the few scenarios where the GTX 680 doesn’t improve on the GTX 580: memory bandwidth. In our overclocking results we discovered that a core overclock had almost no impact on Crysis, whereas a memory overclock improved performance by 8%, almost exactly as much as the memory overclock itself. When it comes to the latest generation of cards it appears that Crysis loves memory bandwidth, and this is something the Radeon HD 7900 series has in spades but the GTX 680 does not. Thankfully for NVIDIA not every game is like Crysis.
The minimum framerate situation is even worse for NVIDIA here, with the GTX 680 clearly falling behind the 7950, and improving on the GTX 580 by only 10%. At its worst Crysis is absolutely devouring memory bandwidth here, and that leaves the GTX 680 underprepared.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
404 Comments
View All Comments
SlyNine - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Wait the boost speed is 1110 vs 1005 right? So 10% faster in shader performance, which will = about 5% in benchmarking performance in the best case.Nothing to see here move along.
Janooo - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Well, 7970@1.1GHz beats plain 680.SlyNine - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Who cares, I wan't to know what the card comes shipped as. Thats what matters, anything extra you get out of that is exactly that, extra. What comes out of the box, thats what they are promising.BoFox - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Wait, you mean that HD 7970 needs to be overclocked by more than 20% in order to beat plain 680?How about overclocking that 680 by 15% like most review sites show is possible?
Then the 7970 would need to be overclocked by an impossible 35% in order to beat a 680 overclocked by 15%.
That was a nice try, Janooo!
Janooo - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
It seems you missed the point.Whatever speed 680 has 7970 can match it. These cards are equal in this regard.
When they have the same clock speed then it looks like 7970 is faster.
Look for AMD to release a faster card soon.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
We will have to subtract some mhz from the 7970 for having a larger core with more die space to make it fair, so transistor for transistor Kepler wins big.CeriseCogburn - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Plus were going to have to subtract more from The Heatie because it cheats on ram size too.Thanks Janooo you have great ideas.
BoFox - Monday, March 26, 2012 - link
Ok, if I go by your analogy and say that overclocking GTX 580 to the same speed as HD 6970 (880 MHz) makes both cards "equal in this regard."When they have the same clock speed then it looks like GTX 580 is faster.
Look for Nvidia to release a faster card soon ultilizing that 8-pin PCI-E connector on the PCB (which it did not need in order to beat HD 7970 overclocked or not).
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - link
680 has made 1,900mhz and makes well over 1,280 ouit of box reference...SlyNine - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Why, thats how it is setup stock. That is how EVERY SINGLE CARD will come.