NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Review: Ultra Expensive, Ultra Rare, Ultra Fast
by Ryan Smith on May 3, 2012 9:00 AM ESTThe Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Bethesda's epic sword & magic game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is our RPG of choice for benchmarking. It's altogether a good CPU benchmark thanks to its complex scripting and AI, but it also can end up pushing a large number of fairly complex models and effects at once, especially with the addition of the high resolution texture pack.
Unfortunately for AMD, Crossfire isn’t just broken with Batman, as it’s also broken here. If they could scale they’d be CPU limited like the GTX 600 series, but instead we’re getting negative performance. Furthermore at 2560 that’s a very choppy 58.8fps for the 7970CF.
In any case, even though we’re CPU limited it’s interesting to see that the GTX 690 still can’t quite catch the GTX 680 SLI. At 2560 it trails by 2%, which is on the edge of experimental variability.
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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!!!