NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Review: Retaking The Performance Crown
by Ryan Smith on March 22, 2012 9:00 AM ESTPortal 2
Portal 2 continues the long and proud tradition of Valve’s in-house Source engine. While Source continues to be a DX9 engine, Valve has continued to upgrade it over the years to improve its quality, and combined with their choice of style you’d have a hard time telling it’s over 7 years old at this point. Consequently Portal 2’s performance does get rather high on high-end cards, but we have ways of fixing that…
Portal 2 ends up being the strongest lead yet for the GTX 680, with the GTX 680 taking a 17% lead at 2560. What’s especially interesting though is performance in the bonus round with SSAA enabled – the GTX 680 takes a wholly unexpected and completely stunning 44% lead over the 7970. In fact it beats out everything here, including the GTX 590 and Radeon HD 6990. Meanwhile the lead over the GTX 580 is even more amazing, with the GTX 680 leading by 67% at these settings.
As it stands the GTX 680 is the first single-GPU card to do better than 60fps, and it does so in a landslide. All things considered, for a lack of memory bandwidth and ROP changes compared to Fermi GTX 680 does extremely well here.
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Exodite - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
I'm a bit confused regarding the multi-display output options, which is a shame as the ability to drive more than two displays at once is something that'll once again make Nvidia interesting for me personally.I regularly run two separate DVI displays for my desktop/work and a HDMI-attached TV for mainly media and some couch surfing.
Will this setup work without issues with the GTX 680?
What kind of power level will it put the card in?
On my Radeon 6950 it bumps idle clocks significantly as soon as I enable multiple displays and I don't consider it an issue, I'm just curious about what the implications are for the GTX 680.
Thanks for an awesome review, as usual!
blanarahul - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - link
Check techpowerup's review!SlitheryDee - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
This is great news. AMD's going to have fight nvidia in the pricing arena. There's going to be some great cards going for really cheap by this holiday season. Yay competition!CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Woo hooooooooooo ! :-)kallogan - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Good gpu but it's not a killer beast like it was announced...silverblue - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
I never expected it to be "as fast as three 580s in SLi" but it's still a very impressive piece of kit.I'm wondering how much performance is yet to come for both Keplar and Tahiti with driver updates, especially the latter.
ccjuju - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
I can't wait for this card to come out so I can buy a discounted 580 instead.TerdFerguson - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
"Battlefield 3 may be the most interesting game in our benchmark suite for a single reason: it’s the first AAA DX10+ game. It’s been 5 years since the launch of the first DX10 GPUs, and 3 whole process node shrinks later we’re finally to the point where games are using DX10’s functionality as a baseline rather than an addition."What, Just Cause 2 didn't count?
bhima - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Bah, I wanted to see Anand review TXAA and NVIDIA's adaptive V-sync features.Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
As you can probably tell, we're a bit behind schedule. We will be discussing both TXAA and adaptive v-sync, though for TXAA we won't technically be reviewing it since it's not available yet.