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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unphased - Saturday, July 28, 2012 - link
I'm using Precision X to OC my Gigabyte GTX 670 and I've got the Mem clock offset at +550Mhz. In the chart log it continues to run at 3557Mhz even while I am not playing any games.Is this normal? I even switched off Aero to check and it hasn't changed.
Gastec - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
I know I'm nobody, not like you americans who are always "somebody" or "something" but I can't just sit here and read and not react. It's enough that I have to put up with them on YouTube, why do you condone them here as well? I'm refering to the likes of Wreckage and CeriseCogburn users that are obviously payed individuals to do negative publicity, here in favor of nVidia. Is that something acceptable here? Am I too old or not "in tone" with the working of the Internet or what?Gastec - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
Having white american genetic traits that allow you to be a convincing how-to-become-rich-and-successful book and TV religion seller migh be a praized quality in your american lands but in my lands we know one thing, and one thing only: that 60 fps is what we want in our games, be them old or new. I don't care if the card can do 120 fps, 10 more than the 110 fps that the other brand can do. That's irrelevant. My monitor works at 60 Hz. If one card can do 55 fps MIN/100 fps MAX, I'll take it over the other one that can do 40 fps MIN/120 fps MAX anyday. So why don't you think about that and convince me to buy your card. With pictures of course.BrotherofCats - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
I have had nothing but trouble with this card from the start. It crashes a dozen times a day, mostly when I am playing a video, but sometimes when I am using my word processor or Excel. Mostly it freezes the screen for about a minute, then come back with a pop up box that states my driver crashed and has recovered. About twice a day it does a complete crash, the two peripheral screens going white and the central screen gray, and I have to hard boot my computer to get it working again. Have asked for help on the Nvidea forums and facebook page, and none of their solutions, clean install of the driver, or using an earlier driver has worked. Saw on the facebook page that other people are having the same problem. Will probably have to scrap this expensive turkey and get something cheaper that works. Not recommended at all.