NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 Review Feat. EVGA: Bringing GK104 Down To $400
by Ryan Smith on May 10, 2012 9:00 AM ESTSynthetics
We’ll also take a quick look at synthetic performance to see if NVIDIA’s choice of clockspeeds and disabling a SMX had any kind of other impact we haven’t anticipated. We’ll start with 3DMark Vantage’s Pixel Fill test.
Pixel Fill is said to be memory bandwidth limited, and for good reason. Even with the lower clockspeed of the GTX 670, the fact that it has memory bandwidth equal to the GTX 680 means that it achieves equal performance in this test, confirming that GTX 670 can utilize its memory bandwidth just as well as GTX 680 can.
Our second test is 3DMark’s Texel Fill test, which as expected shows a moderate gap between the GTX 670 and GTX 680. Thanks to the loss of an SMX and the lower clocksped the GTX 670 only achieves 85% of the performance of the GTX 680, which thanks to the GTX 670’s more aggressive boost clock is a bit better than what we’d expect from the specifications.
Our third theoretical test is the set of settings we use with Microsoft’s Detail Tessellation sample program out of the DX11 SDK
As expected GTX 670 falls behind GTX 680, but again not by nearly as much as we’d expect. The loss of the SMX means GTX 670 lost a Polymorph Engine, but with only a 4% gap with maximum tessellation you’d never be able to tell.
Our final theoretical test is Unigine Heaven 2.5, a benchmark that straddles the line between a synthetic benchmark and a real-world benchmark as the engine is licensed but no notable DX11 games have been produced using it yet.
With Heaven the gap between the GTX 680 and GTX 670 once again opens up similarly to what we saw in our compute benchmarks with SmallLuxGPU. This means the GTX 670 falls behind by about 10%, reflecting the shader-heavy nature of this benchmark.
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Spunjji - Friday, May 11, 2012 - link
Sick burn ;DyankeeDDL - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link
Why would AMD fans be sad?AMD enjoyed a multi-months lead in performance, over-charging for their cards that had, substantially, no competitions at their price levels.
Now NVIDIA made a move, and it's a very good one: AMD will need to drop the prices and I see really no reason why they couldn't, as they have just a marginally larger die size (300mm2 vs 365mm2) on the same fab/technology.
Price drop is always a win for the customers, be that an Nvidia or an AMD fanboy (or just an enthusiast).
MrSpadge - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link
That's right. With some more pressure and HD7950 at 300€ GCN may actually start to become a real option! Saying this as a Cayman owning AMD-preferer.andrewaggb - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link
It's not like the 7970 is a bad card, it's somewhat slower at games, has more ram, is much faster at gpu compute, and is still a relatively low power offering.There's always something better just around the corner. Buy what's best when you need it, and be happy about it :-). Give it 6 months to a year and there will be something better than the 670 as well.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, May 11, 2012 - link
If the 7970 is much faster at gpu compute, why did it lose 3 of 5 compute benchmarks in this review ?Hmm... loser but better, loser but better...
Also amd power loser but "still relatively a low power offering", loser but relatively a winner, loses but it's a winner anyway...
I've got it ! The loser is better and wins !
SlyNine - Saturday, May 12, 2012 - link
Seriously dude. I MIGHT could give you the first point, if it wasn't riddled full of biased.But the second point doesn't even make sense.
"Also amd power loser but "still relatively a low power offering", loser but relatively a winner, loses but it's a winner anyway..."
Now you're just throwing words in his mouth he didn't even use. What a fail!
GTX680 owner speaking.
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, May 13, 2012 - link
" and is still a relatively low power offering." (his words I responded to)Okay, maybe I went overboard.
On the other hand, we haven't heard this going the other way at all, and the 7970's loss in the power envelope is loss of a reason to buy an amd card.
Relatively, it's a high power offering, we are after all comparing the two brands, and it's high power usage allows the claims for victory in compute (even when the software base does not).
Galidou - Sunday, May 13, 2012 - link
''Okay, maybe I went overboard.''You do that all day long going overboard...
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, May 13, 2012 - link
You do nothing but lie and attack, so you have zero room to talk.Galidou - Monday, May 14, 2012 - link
And I am the one who attack, I attack but not you? LOL you're so fun, don'T make me copy and paste every word lack of respect the abuse of words such as massive ignorance, stupid, everyone lies but not you... and everyone lacks of respect but not you... OMG that's extreme