NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Review: Ultra Expensive, Ultra Rare, Ultra Fast
by Ryan Smith on May 3, 2012 9:00 AM ESTCivilization V
Our final game, Civilization 5, gives us an interesting look at things that other RTSes cannot match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry, driver command lists for reducing CPU overhead, and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
As with Total War: Shogun 2 we’re reaching the point where we’re CPU limited. Even at 2560 we’re clearly capping out at around 95fps, and at 1920 our results just get outright weird to the point where we may be seeing the first and only evidence of the overhead from NVIDIA’s move to static scheduling on Kepler.
In any case, even though we’re approaching a CPU bottleneck the GTX 690 still does well enough for itself here versus both AMD and NVIDIA. We’re looking at a 5% lead at 2560 over the 7970CF, while performance reaches 99% of the GTX 680 SLI.
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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.