NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Review: Ultra Expensive, Ultra Rare, Ultra Fast
by Ryan Smith on May 3, 2012 9:00 AM ESTBattlefield 3
Its popularity aside, 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. Not surprisingly BF3 is one of the best looking games in our suite, but as with past Battlefield games that beauty comes with a high performance cost.
Battlefield 3 has been NVIDIA’s crown jewel; a widely played multiplayer game with a clear lead for NVIDIA hardware. And with multi-GPU thrown into the picture that doesn’t change, leading to the GTX 690 once again taking a very clear lead here over the 7970CF at all resolutions. With that said, we see something very interesting at 5760, with NVIDIA’s lead shrinking by quite a bit. What was a 21% lead at 2560 is only a 10% at 5760. So far we haven’t seen any strong evidence of NVIDIA being VRAM limited with only 2GB of VRAM and while this isn’t strong evidence that the situation has changed is does warrant consideration. If anything is going to be VRAM limited after all it’s BF3.
Meanwhile compared to the GTX 680 SLI the GTX 690 is doing okay here. It’s only achieving 93% of the GTX 680 SLI’s performance at 2560, but for some reason pulls ahead at 5760, covering that to 96% of the performance of the dual video card setup.
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Ryan Smith - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
Correct, we're using the Steam version. I reloaded it as of last week.bpwnes - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
...but will it blend?Luscious - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
I'll take three, thanks!!!tipoo - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
Send me 10 grand and I'll send you three of the nitrogen enriched versions.Makaveli - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
Is this a review for the 7970 CF or 690 lolFor a $1000 card that is not a very good showing. i'm thinking that 2GB limit per gpu is really starting to hurt them not to mention the 256bit memory bus.
shin0bi272 - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
That's what I was thinking. Imagine what they could have done if they'd of expanded the bus to 384bit per gpu... such a sad showing.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
There are plenty of 4BG 680 reviews out there that certainly disprove your thinking, and lack of knowledge.silverblue - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
This card has 2GB per GPU, not 4. Also, the lack of memory (!) will limit performance before the memory bus does. Compared to previous NVIDIA products, the 680 has far faster memory which mitigates having a narrower bus.shin0bi272 - Saturday, May 5, 2012 - link
I guess we'll see when the gk110 arrives this summerCeriseCogburn - Saturday, May 5, 2012 - link
There is no limit with the 2G of memory, but none of you have looked at teh dozens of reviews and hundreds of blogs proofs, so you will keep babbling stupid things, forever, it appears.