NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Review: Retaking The Performance Crown
by Ryan Smith on March 22, 2012 9:00 AM ESTTotal War: Shogun 2
Total War: Shogun 2 is the latest installment of the long-running Total War series of turn based strategy games, and alongside Civilization V is notable for just how many units it can put on a screen at once. As it also turns out, it’s the single most punishing game in our benchmark suite (on higher end hardware at least).
With Shogun 2 the GTX 680 sees its first decisive win at last. At the all-punishing resolution of 2560 the GTX 680 not only becomes the first single-GPU card to crack 30fps, but it takes a 16% lead over the 7970 here. Even at a more practical resolution and setting of 1920 the GTX 680 still leads by 15%. Meanwhile the GTX 580 fares even worse here, with the GTX 680 leading by 51% at 2560 and a whopping 63% at 1920. Even the GTX 590 can only barely beat the GTX 680 at 2560, only to lose at 1920.
At this point we’re not sure what it is about the GTX 680 that improves on the GTX 580 by so much. Shogun 2 does use a lot of VRAM, and while the greater amount of VRAM on the GTX 680 alone wouldn’t seem to explain this, the fact that most of that memory is consumed by textures just might. We may be seeing the benefit of the much greater number of texture units GTX 680 has.
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coldpower27 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Well, it's possible, but for financial reasons they won't do so.If they had created a 28nm product with similar thermals as the GTX 580 as well as similar die size you would indeed see a massive increase in performance..
However this generation nVidia wanted to improve on all aspects to some degree so as such not as much can go into performance.
We have an massive improvement in die area, a mile improvement in performance and a decent improvement in energy consumption and considerable improvement in energy efficiency. A very well balanced product.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
The GTX580 is $470, so who believes Nvidia was dropping a killer card in at $299 like Charlie D the red fan lie disseminator said in his rumor starting post ?His lie has worked magic on all minds.
silverblue - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
The 680 shouldn't be $300 any more than the 580 should be $470.CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - link
Spinning so hard you're agreeing while drilling yourself into a dark hole.SlyNine - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Agreed, back when the 9700pro came out we seen the first signs of this. The cards began needing external power adapters. The HSF's started growing to get those 4x increases.It was only a matter of time until they hit a wall with that method, and here we are.
johnpombrio - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Rumor is that BIG Kepler will be named GTX685 and be out in August.Philbar71 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
"it takes a 16% lead over the GTX 7970 here"Whats a GTX 7970????
prophet001 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
hahai saw that too... must have been a late night last night. we can let it slide :)
N4g4rok - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
It's pretty impressive. I'd like to see what it will cost from one of the retail sites. I'm not necessarily regretting the 7950 i got, but that nice little FPS bump you get from the 680 is nothing to turn your nose up at.Jorgisven - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
"Overall GTX 580 is targeted at a power envelope somewhere between GTX 560 Ti and GTX 580, though it’s closer to the former than the latter." Is this a typo (580 instead of the intended 680)? Or am I just not understanding this correctly?