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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XiZeL - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Here is a questionhow many screens can i connect at once on this?
silverblue - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Good question. I've seen mentions of four at once, three in 3D, but I'm not sure.noeldillabough - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
I'd also really like to know the answer to this. Also, where to buy? Everywhere seems to have a "out of stock"Ryan Smith - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
It supports 4 screens, though Surround mode (SLS) is limited to 3 screens and then the 4th is a separate surface.Slayer68 - Saturday, March 24, 2012 - link
As far as spanning goes it's 3 of the SAME screens. Might be able to use all 4 ports in non spanned mode for the desktop but not sure why you'd do that for gaming since it would only show up on 1 monitor.Pessimism - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Nvidia knowingly sold defective products to multiple large vendors over a lengthy course of time. Never honor them with your money. The CEO has never publicly acknowledged or apologized for this mistake.CeriseCogburn - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
AMD ati in the gaming console space as well.I guess you get to enjoy VIA chrome with your held back punishment dollars.
Don't buy HP as their defective heatsinks were the cause.
Your console vendor choices are also cut down no xboxes.
BoFox - Monday, March 26, 2012 - link
LOL!!! That was funny!Yeah, and don't buy AMD because they lied about the Bulldozer transistor number! Dave Baumann recently posted over at B3D with the exact words that it's "just a marketing number".
silverblue - Monday, March 26, 2012 - link
I was under the impression that PR just got the number wrong...Soldier1969 - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Clerly beats AMD's best. I'll take 2 plsase to replace my 2 580s 3gb versions. Pure ownage at my 2560 x 1600 res. Nice read thanks.