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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SlyNine - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Wait the boost speed is 1110 vs 1005 right? So 10% faster in shader performance, which will = about 5% in benchmarking performance in the best case.Nothing to see here move along.
Janooo - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Well, 7970@1.1GHz beats plain 680.SlyNine - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Who cares, I wan't to know what the card comes shipped as. Thats what matters, anything extra you get out of that is exactly that, extra. What comes out of the box, thats what they are promising.BoFox - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Wait, you mean that HD 7970 needs to be overclocked by more than 20% in order to beat plain 680?How about overclocking that 680 by 15% like most review sites show is possible?
Then the 7970 would need to be overclocked by an impossible 35% in order to beat a 680 overclocked by 15%.
That was a nice try, Janooo!
Janooo - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
It seems you missed the point.Whatever speed 680 has 7970 can match it. These cards are equal in this regard.
When they have the same clock speed then it looks like 7970 is faster.
Look for AMD to release a faster card soon.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
We will have to subtract some mhz from the 7970 for having a larger core with more die space to make it fair, so transistor for transistor Kepler wins big.CeriseCogburn - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Plus were going to have to subtract more from The Heatie because it cheats on ram size too.Thanks Janooo you have great ideas.
BoFox - Monday, March 26, 2012 - link
Ok, if I go by your analogy and say that overclocking GTX 580 to the same speed as HD 6970 (880 MHz) makes both cards "equal in this regard."When they have the same clock speed then it looks like GTX 580 is faster.
Look for Nvidia to release a faster card soon ultilizing that 8-pin PCI-E connector on the PCB (which it did not need in order to beat HD 7970 overclocked or not).
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - link
680 has made 1,900mhz and makes well over 1,280 ouit of box reference...SlyNine - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Why, thats how it is setup stock. That is how EVERY SINGLE CARD will come.