Civilization V

Our other strategy game, Civilization V, gives us an interesting look at things that other RTSes cannot match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry, driver command lists for reducing CPU overhead, and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.

Civilization V is another game that not only tends to favor NVIDIA video cards, but strongly favors GK110 cards in particular. As a result the lead over the 7970GE is an incredible 47%, and the lead over the GTX 680 is right next to it at 46%. Though admittedly we’ve reached a point where the difference is almost academic, since even a GTX 680 can hit 60fps at 2560.

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  • Stuka87 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link

    Not for the 780 they don't. There are some cards that have Duke Nukem Forever (lol) and some that have Metro: Last Light. But nothing like what AMD offers.
  • chizow - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link

    Metro was not listed when I checked today, EVGA in the past has done their customers right by sending them codes, but not always, depends how tightly Nvidia controls the promotion.
  • jonjonjonj - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link

    i want free games. wah wah wah. screw free games. i would rather a cheaper more competitively price card then get some game i don't even want.
  • Homeles - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link

    I really like the "Delta Performances" method of comparing the smoothness between each card.
  • hero1 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link

    This is one awesome card. I really don't think that AMD can compete with Nvidia atm but I would like to see what they have to offer. I want this card but I will be buying the custom cooled ones due to better cooling. Thanks for an awesome review, I have been waiting patiently, not!
  • formulav8 - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link

    I haven't seen anything even close to dire for AMD that they should all that worried about. Unless I missed something?
  • mayankleoboy1 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link

    $649 ?
    Move along, nothing to do here.
  • EzioAs - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link

    That was my original plan, but I ended up reading the article. Ahh, curiosity...
  • Spoelie - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link

    The paragraph on SMXs and GPCs is confusing without the information available from the original Titan piece. One has to remember or infer that Titan already had an SMX disabled, and that in fact GK110 has 15 SMXs built in. This conclusion is also non-obvious because the text before discussed there were no disabled functional units in *most* product tiers.

    Otherwise the reduction from 14 SMXs to 12 SMXs would imply 2 disabled clusters, not 3.
  • chaosbloodterfly - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link

    Waiting to see what AMD has for the 8970. Hopefully they don't do what nVidia did for the 680 and release something with barely better performance with almost zero pricing pressure 6 months later.

    I want something worth liquid cooling damn it!

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