NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Review: Retaking The Performance Crown
by Ryan Smith on March 22, 2012 9:00 AM ESTMetro 2033
Paired with Crysis as our second behemoth FPS is Metro: 2033. Metro gives up Crysis’ lush tropics and frozen wastelands for an underground experience, but even underground it can be quite brutal on GPUs, which is why it’s also our new benchmark of choice for looking at power/temperature/noise during a game. If its sequel due this year is anywhere near as GPU intensive then a single GPU may not be enough to run the game with every quality feature turned up.
Thankfully for NVIDIA Metro is much, much better than Crysis for the GTX 680. The GTX 680 still trails the 7970 by a few percent at 2560, but it’s now clearly ahead of the 7950. Performance relative to the GTX 580 is far better, with the GTX 680 leading by 34%. In our experience Metro is very shader heavy, and this would appear to be confirmation of that as the GTX 680 has far greater shader resources than GTX 580.
What’s particularly interesting here though is that the GTX 680 has nearly caught up with the GTX 590. NVIDIA’s SLI scaling for Metro isn’t particularly fantastic, but it’s still quite a leap compared to the GTX 580. Consequently this is the first sign that the GTX 680 can compete with the GTX 590, which would be quite an accomplishment.
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ET - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Impressive combination of performance and power draw. AMD will have to adjust pricing.This looks promising for the lower end cards (which are of more interest to me). AMD's 77x0 cards have been somewhat disappointing, and I'll be looking forward to see what NVIDIA can offer in that price bracket and also the 78x0 competition.
rahvin - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
With 28nm limited (in part because of the TSMC shutdown of the line) we won't see price reductions, the parts are going to be too limited for that to happen unfortunately, that is unless AMD stockpiled tons of chips before the TSMC shutdown. What we might see is AMD releasing drivers or new cards that stop underclocking their chips to keep the TDP so low. From what I've read in the reviews AMD has underclocked their cards significantly and could issue drivers tomorrow that boosts performance 30% but at the sacrifice of increased power consumption.The 680 appears to be a very nice card, but they tossed the compute performance out the window to accomplish it, the 580 smokes the 680 in most of the compute benchmarks. I find that disappointing personally and won't be upgrading as from my perspective it's not much of an upgrade against a 580. Shoot, show me a game that strains the 580, with every game produced a console port that is designed for DX9 I'm not sure why anyone bothers upgrading.
Janooo - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Ryan, why you did not include OC79XX as you did with OC GTX460 when 68XX were launched?Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Because you guys have made it abundantly clear that you don't want us doing that.http://www.anandtech.com/show/3988/the-use-of-evga...
Janooo - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
"We were honestly afraid that if we didn't include at least a representative of the factory overclocked GTX 460s that we would get accused of being too favorable to AMD. As always, this is your site - you ultimately end up deciding how we do things around here. So I'm asking all of you to chime in with your thoughts - how would you like to handle these types of situations in the future?"Anand is asking what to do. The article form the link is not a proof of that. What are you talking about?
chizow - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
I think he's referring to the 620 comments worth of nerdrage more than the article.prophet001 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
bad nerdrage is bad :(Janooo - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
I see.Still 680 overclocks/boosts on the fly and 7970 has set clock.
It's hard to compare them.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
If you keep the 680 cool it goes faster - so a good way would be to crank the 680's fan to 100% and watch it further trounce the 7970, right ?Janooo - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
That's the thing. I am not sure 680 can clock higher than 7970. If we do the same for both cards 7970 might end up faster card.