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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theSeb - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
I must say I found it quite odd and hilarious to see people accusing Anandtech of favouring AMD by using a monitor with a 1200 vertical resolution. 16:10 monitors are not that uncommon and we really should be showing the industry what we think by not purchasing 16:9 monitors.Anyway, if anything this review seems to be Nvidia biased, in my opinion. The 7970 CF does not do too badly, In fact it beats the 690 / 680 CF in many games and only loses out in the games where it's "broken". I am not sure why you cannot recommend it based on the numbers in your benchmarks since it hardly embarrasses itself.
silverblue - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
It's not "people", it's "person"... and he's only here to troll graphics card articles.When AMD gets it right, CrossFire is absolutely blistering. Unfortunately, the sad state of affairs is that AMD isn't getting it right with a good proportion of the games in this review.
NVIDIA may not get quite as high scaling as AMD when AMD does get it right, but they're just far more consistent at providing good performance. This is the main gripe about AMD; with a few more resources devoted to the project, surely they can overcome this?
CeriseCogburn - Friday, May 4, 2012 - link
Yes, of course, call names forever, but never dispute the facts.I will agree with you though, amd drivers suck especially in CF, and they suck for a lot of games for a long long time.
silverblue - Friday, May 4, 2012 - link
No, I said AMD's drivers have issues with Crossfire, not that they suck in general.I've also checked three random British websites and there's no issues whatsoever in finding a 1920x1200 monitor. I also looked at NewEgg and found eight immediately. It's really not difficult to find one.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, May 5, 2012 - link
1920x1200 all of you protesteth far too much.The cat is out of the bag and you won't be putting it back in.
Enjoy the bias, you obviously do, and leave me alone, stop the stalking.
seapeople - Saturday, May 5, 2012 - link
I'm with ya bro. Forget these high resolution monitor nancy's who don't know what they're missing. I'm rockin' games just fine with 60+ fps on my 720p plasma tv, and that's at 600hz! Just you try to get 24xAAAA in 3D (that's 1200hz total) on that 1920x1200 monitor of yours!Framerate fanboys unite!
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, May 6, 2012 - link
Ahh, upped the ante to plasma monitors ? ROFL - desperation of you people knows no bounds.saf227 - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
On page 2 of the review - where you have all the pictures of the card - we have no real basis for figuring out the cards true size. Could you include a reference in one of those photos? Say, a ruler or a pencil or something, so we have an idea what the size of the card truly is?Ryan Smith - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
The card is 10" long, the same length as the GTX 590 (that should be listed on page 2). But I'll take that under consideration for future articles.ueharaf - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
why they back to 256 bits and the gtx 590 have 384 bits?!?!cause they dont want to have a lot of advantage?
maybe the next gtx 790 will have again 384 bits and it would be better than gtx690 ....come on!!!