NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Review: Ultra Expensive, Ultra Rare, Ultra Fast
by Ryan Smith on May 3, 2012 9:00 AM ESTGeForce Experience & The Test
Before jumping into our test results, there’s one last thing we wanted to touch upon quickly. Along with announcing the GTX 690 at the NVIDIA Gaming Festival 2012, NVIDIA also used the occasion to announce a new software utility called GeForce Experience.
For some time now NVIDIA has offered a feature they call Optimal Playable Settings through GeForce.com, which are a series of game setting configurations that NVIDIA has tested and is recommending for various GeForce video cards. It’s a genuinely useful service, but it’s also not well known and only covers desktop GPUs.
With GeForce Experience NVIDIA is going to be taking that concept one step further and offering an application that interfaces with both the game and the successor to NVIDIA’s OPS service. The key difference being that rather than having the settings on a website and requiring the user to punch in those settings by hand, GeForce Experience can fetch those settings from NVIDIA and make the settings changes on its own. This would make the process much more accessible, as not only do users not need to know anything about how to access their settings or what they do, but the moment NVIDIA includes this with their drivers it will be far more widespread than OPS ever was.
The other change is that NVIDIA is going to be moving away from manual testing in favor of automated testing. OPS are generated by hand, whereas GeForce Experience settings are going to be based on automated testing, allowing NVIDIA to cover a wider range of games and video cards, most importantly by including mobile video cards. NVIDIA already has GPU farms for driver regression testing, so this is a logical extension of that concept to use those farms to generate and test game settings.
GeForce Experience will be launching in beta form on June 6th.
The Test
The press drivers for the GTX 690 are 301.33, though it sounds like NVIDIA will actually launch with a slightly newer version today. As the GTX 690 is launching so soon after the GTX 680 these drivers are virtually identical to the GTX 680 launch drivers. Meanwhile for the GeForce 500 series we’re using 301.24, and for the AMD Radeon cards Catalyst 12.4
We’d also like to give a shout-out to Asus, who sent us one of their wonderful PA246Q 24” P-IPS monitors to allow us to complete our monitor set for multi-monitor testing. From here on we’ll be able to offer multi-monitor results for our high-end cards, and a number of cards have already had that data added in Bench.
Next, based on an informal poll on our forums we’re going to be continuing our existing SLI/CF testing methodology. All of our test results will be with both cards directly next to each other as opposed to spaced apart in order to test the worst case scenario. Users with such a configuration are a minority based on our data, but there are still enough of them that we believe it should be covered.
Finally, we’d like to note that since we don’t have a matching pair of 7970 reference cards, we’re using our one reference card along with XFX’s R7970 BEDD. For gaming performance, power consumption, and temperatures this doesn’t have a material impact, but it means we don’t have meaningful noise performance for the 7970.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | EVGA X79 SLI |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.2.3.1022 |
| Power Supply: | Antec True Power Quattro 1200 |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung 470 (256GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1867 4 x 4GB (8-10-9-26) |
| Case: | Thermaltake Spedo Advance |
| Monitor: |
Samsung 305T Asus PA246Q |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 7970 AMD Radeon HD 6990 AMD Radeon HD 6970 AMD Radeon HD 5970 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 301.24 NVIDIA ForceWare 301.33 AMD Catalyst 12.4 |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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InsaneScientist - Sunday, May 6, 2012 - link
Except that nVidia wins in the article and all of the accumulated benches here, even at 1920x1200 (which this card would be a complete waste on...), so what exactly are you complaining about?It's bias if they say that the AMD cards are better when they're not, but in the benchmarks and in the conclusions (here and elsewhere), nVidia is consistently ahead, so any claims of bias are completely groundless...
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, May 8, 2012 - link
Read my first post instead of asking or having already read it attack like you just did and continue to be a jerk who cares, right ?You obviously are all seriously upset about the little facts I gave in my very first post. You're all going bonkers over it, and you all know I'm correct, that's what really bothers all of you.
Continue to be bothered, you cannot help it, that's for sure.
Sabresiberian - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
It's certainly not crazy, I'd certainly run 3 1920x1200 monitors over 3 1920x1080s.;)
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
I guess all of you got very upset that my point was made, you're looking at a biased for amd set of benchmarks. I'm sure most of you are very happy about that, but angered it has been effectively pointed out.Makaveli - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
The only thing were are upset about is your being a tool!And what point? you haven't shown a shread of evidence to back up this bias claim only whats floating around in your head!
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, May 6, 2012 - link
Go look at the link you missed since you cannot read and only attack and call names.james.jwb - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
I always love these guys who behave like this.On the one hand, if they are trolling just for the reaction, it's fascinating. What kind of weird creature lies behind the internet persona? In most cases, we all know it must be a sad figure of a person with all sorts of interesting personality problems.
But on the flip side, if this person actually means and believes what they say is some sort of honest analysis, it's just as fascinating. What kind of thick bastard must then lurk behind the keyboard in question?
It boggles the mind :)
silverblue - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
Reminds me of SiliconDoc. That particular numpty got banned as far as I remember.Galidou - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
I think that these creatures are Nvidia's fanboy, they react always the same way. CeriseCogburn remember me one of them a little while ago, can't remember his name. He was convinced that the 7970 pricing was the worst thing to ever happen to humanity since the birth of Justin Bieber, or at least, it looked alot like that. Sure the price wasn't attractive, but there's some limit you must not cross to stay in the real world.So as weird a creature they can be, I believe they are a result of Nvidia's funding them to spread insanity in forums speaking of video cards. They can't be natural things after all, they just don't make sense. Their closed mind is second to none. Or else, they could only have the possibility to type insanities and a filter to read the replies to stop some information entering their brain.
Parhel - Friday, May 4, 2012 - link
Do you really think ATI and nVidia would pay these weird, sad, little trolls to piss off readers every time one of their products is reviewed? It's an embarassment and a distraction. No, I think they would pay someone like that NOT to talk about their products if they could. I'm sure that employees do write comments on product reviews, but guys like this are bad for business. Nobody wants someone like that on their side. If I were nVidia, I'd pay that guy to become an AMD fan!!!