NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Review: Ultra Expensive, Ultra Rare, Ultra Fast
by Ryan Smith on May 3, 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).
Unfortunately for NVIDIA they’re in a bit of a bind with Shogun 2. The March 22nd patch effectively broke Kepler performance under certain situations. GTX 680 performance has been nearly halved due to that patch; what was 33fps at 2560 is now 18fps. As near as we can tell this is a problem with the game – Shogun 2 wouldn’t know what the GTX 680 is and suddenly doesn’t know what to do with it – but the end result is that GTX 680/690 users are in trouble here.
As it stands 2560 is utterly broken – perhaps due to MSAA or shadowing – but our results at 5760 and 1920, which use the Very High profile, have not dropped due to the patch and as aresult we have at least some confidence in them. To that end while NVIDIA’s multi-GPU scaling is quite good at 5760 at 95%, not only does AMD have a lead over the GTX 680 with a single 7970, but Crossfire scaling is nearly perfect. Furthermore the GTX 690 once more has trouble boosting here, leading to a 7% deficit compared to the GTX 680 SLI. As a result the GTX 690 only reaches 85% of the performance of the 7970CF here. Things look better at 1920, but besides being a rather low resolution for the GTX 690 we’re also CPU limited by that point.
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chadwilson - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
OpenCL by it's very nature is open, it is not an AMD API.CeriseCogburn - Friday, May 4, 2012 - link
Not after amd gets through with it.silverblue - Friday, May 4, 2012 - link
We'll see once somebody posts benchmarks of it.CeriseCogburn - Friday, May 11, 2012 - link
Excuse me but you're wrong, again." by Ryan Smith on Thursday, May 10, 2012
According to WinZip it only supports AMD GPUs, which is why we're not using it in NVIDIA reviews at this time. "
Ryan's comment from the 670 release review.
chadwilson - Friday, May 4, 2012 - link
You haven't bothered to do even the most basic research as to who owns OpenCL have you? Perhaps you should visit google before posting hyperboleCeriseCogburn - Saturday, May 5, 2012 - link
I'm sure the gamer's manifesto amd company "ownz it" now, and also certain it has immediately become all of yours favorite new benchmark you cannot wait to demand be shown here 100% of the time, it's so gaming evolved.CeriseCogburn - Friday, May 11, 2012 - link
Here's some research mt know it all: " by Ryan Smith on Thursday, May 10, 2012According to WinZip it only supports AMD GPUs, which is why we're not using it in NVIDIA reviews at this time. "
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Congratulations on utter FAIL.
eman17j - Sunday, August 19, 2012 - link
look at this websitehttp://developer.nvidia(dot)com/cuda/opencl
prophet001 - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
First off, thank you for this review. If you didn't do this, we'd have no idea how these GPUs perform in the wild. It is very nice to come here and read a graph and make educated decisions on which card we should purchase. It is appreciated.The one thing that I wanted to question is why you feel that you can't recommend the 7970. At the very least perhaps the recommendation of which card to get should be based on the game you're playing.
Reviewing the data you published, the average frame rates for the 5 top performers over all bench marks are;
680 SLI 119 fps
690 GTX 116 fps
7970 CF 103 fps
680 GTX 72.9 fps
7970 65.5 fps
Also, the number of times which the 7970 dipped below 60 fps in the benchmarks (excluding the minimum frame rate benchmarks) alone, without the 680 doing the same was 4. This is over 29 benchmarks and some of the dips were minimal.
This aligned with the price considerations makes me wonder why one wouldn't consider the 7970?
Ryan Smith - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
"The one thing that I wanted to question is why you feel that you can't recommend the 7970. At the very least perhaps the recommendation of which card to get should be based on the game you're playing."Under normal circumstances we would do this. For example GTX 570 vs Raadeon HD 6970 last year; the two traded blows often enough that it came down to the game being played. However the key was that the two were always close.
In 20% of our games, 7970CF performance is nowhere close to GTX 690 because CF is broken in those games. It would be one thing if AMD's CF scaling in those games was simply weaker, but instead we have no scaling and negative scaling in games that are 5+ months old.
For single card setups AMD is still fine, but I cannot in good faith recommend CF when it's failing on major games like this. Because you never know what games in the future may end up having the same problem.