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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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!!!