EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Classified Review: Pushing GTX 680 To Its Peak
by Ryan Smith on July 20, 2012 12:00 PM ESTPortal 2, Battlefield 3, Starcraft II, Skyrim, Civilization V, & Compute
Moving on to the back-half of our benchmarks, these are the games that the Kepler architecture traditionally excels at. Hopefully this means we’ll get to see the GTX 680 Classified spread its wings a bit more here.
Given how much of an emphasis SSAA puts on GPU performance it comes as no great surprise that the GTX 680 Classified does fairly well here, picking up an additional 9-10% compared to the reference GTX 680. At 52.4fps it’s just shy of what would be needed to smoothly play Portal 2 at 5670x1200 with SSAA.
Meanwhile its gains in BF3 are tempered somewhat, only picking up 7% at 2560. Though this is still enough to push it past 70fps. 1920 resolution gamers looking for a 120fps experience will also see some improvement, but it’s still not enough to average 120fps on a single card.
Oddly our SC2 framerates are almost flat. SC2 is most often CPU bound so that does come into play to some degree, but we would have expected a bit of a gain at 2560 given the 4% gain at 1920.
However the typically CPU-bound Skyrim actuals eeks out a small 3% performance improvement at 2560. Still, even a reference GTX 680 is overkill for Skyrim without 3rd part modifications.
Finally, Civilization V sees some performance improvements, but again it’s less than the full force of the factory GPU overclock. 6% at 2560 will be all that the GTX 680 Classified can do.
Moving on to compute quickly, since most compute tasks are GPU-bound the factory overclock does help to some degree. The Radeon HD 7970GE is still more than a potent adversary though.
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plonk420 - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
i'm kinda more interested in 8xMSAA or 4xSSAA...Ryan Smith - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
Ahh, okay, I see what you mean.So the short answer is that the memory requirements on Ultra are so high that we wouldn't be able to test most of our previous-generation 1GB cards at 1920 if we used it. I did want to have Ultra in there somewhere so that was the compromise I had to make to balance that with the need for a useful test at 1920.
Though I will agree that it's unorthodox.
RussianSensation - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
At the same time that would be pretty useful to see if GTX570/580 run out of VRAM in Shogun with Ultra settings at 1080P. What if GTX660Ti only has 1.5GB of VRAM? We'd want to know if it's already starting to become a bare minimum in games :)CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
The 570 and 580 don't run out, but the 5750, 5870, and 6950 1gb and 6970 1gb do. A lot of amd fans have those 1gb cards because as usual, the amd fan is all about scrimping pennies and claiming they have the best anyway. Sad, isn't it.Sadder is the 1920x1200 rez they use here, which allows crap amd cards to lose by less when most people have 1920x1080 where nVidia stomps on amd ever harder, because as usual, amd fan boys are hacking away over pennies and buy the much cheaper and far more common 1920x1080 monitors instead of 1920x1200, saving $50 minimum amd more like $100+.
So, amd loses, all around, again, as usual.
Sabresiberian - Sunday, July 22, 2012 - link
There is no "1200p"Catch-phrases like "720p" and "1080p" refer to television formats; they aren't just the vertical pixel number. 1920x1200 is not a television standard, and the "p" is superfluous.
;)
LtGoonRush - Friday, July 20, 2012 - link
While EVGA's cooler is an improvement over stock, I wonder how a capable card like this would perform if paired with an high performance cooler like the Arctic Accelero Xtreme III. Kepler-based cards drop their boost clocks above 70C to compensate for increased leakage, so it would be interesting to see how fast this card could get while staying below that mark. Even at maximum RPMs the fans would probably be quieter than this one.pandemonium - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
I can't understand where the market for this card is. Wait, nevermind. I forgot how many nVidia fanbois there are out there...RussianSensation - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
So true. $740 GTX680 with a volt-mod kit vs. $450 HD7970 that overclocks on stock voltage to 1.175V and gives the same performance. NV marketing machine FTW!CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
Amd cards never give the same performance as they lack so many features.you can perhaps, if you're lucky, get an fps only equivlanet in a few old games, or a hacked equivalent with crappy IQ that I'm sure you cannot see anyway, and in that case your power/performance is a big fat loser too - we cannot suddenly forget that for just this latest round when it was the most important point ever made for several years just prior now can we...
pffffft !~
ypsylon - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
Not with this card. When you buy reference for liquid cooling then you can't go wrong with EVGA. Best cards around. When you buy EVGA Hydrocopper - you can't go wrong. But EVGA Classified are usually only highly overpriced reference designs. Yes there are tweaks here and there, but for max performance [air cooler] out of GTX family most people [including my humble person] go to MSI TwinFrozr3 Lighting/EX.or Asus 3 slot bricks (name escapes me).Lately EVGA sliding with theirs top offerings. SR-X motherboard is cruel joke when compared to ASUS dual CPU creation and now this. Another misfire.
But I think EVGA doesn't care too much. They have devoted customers who buy everything EVGA without thinking...