NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Review: Retaking The Performance Crown
by Ryan Smith on March 22, 2012 9:00 AM ESTTotal War: Shogun 2
Total War: Shogun 2 is the latest installment of the long-running Total War series of turn based strategy games, and alongside Civilization V is notable for just how many units it can put on a screen at once. As it also turns out, it’s the single most punishing game in our benchmark suite (on higher end hardware at least).
With Shogun 2 the GTX 680 sees its first decisive win at last. At the all-punishing resolution of 2560 the GTX 680 not only becomes the first single-GPU card to crack 30fps, but it takes a 16% lead over the 7970 here. Even at a more practical resolution and setting of 1920 the GTX 680 still leads by 15%. Meanwhile the GTX 580 fares even worse here, with the GTX 680 leading by 51% at 2560 and a whopping 63% at 1920. Even the GTX 590 can only barely beat the GTX 680 at 2560, only to lose at 1920.
At this point we’re not sure what it is about the GTX 680 that improves on the GTX 580 by so much. Shogun 2 does use a lot of VRAM, and while the greater amount of VRAM on the GTX 680 alone wouldn’t seem to explain this, the fact that most of that memory is consumed by textures just might. We may be seeing the benefit of the much greater number of texture units GTX 680 has.
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Sabresiberian - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Do you work for AMD's marketing department, or are you just a fanboy with tunnel vision?silverblue - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Could be beenthere under a different name... ;)CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Youtube has settled that lie - all the "bumpgate" models have defectively designed heatsinks - end users are inserting a penny (old for copper content) above the gpu to solve the large gap while removing the laughable quarter inch thick spongepad.It was all another lie that misplaced blame. Much like the ati chip that failed in xbox360 - never blamed on ati strangely.... (same thing bad HS design).
Arbie - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
IMHO the only game worth basing a purchase decision on is Crysis / Waheard. There, even the 7950 beats the GTX680, especially in the crucial area of minimum frame rate. The AMD cards also take significantly less power long-term (which is most important) and at load. They are noisier under load but not enough to matter while I'm playing.
So for me it's still AMD.
kallogan - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Don't know if you can say that. Crysis is old now. No directx 11. But it's true the GTX 680 does not particularly shine in heavy games like Metro 2033 or Crysis warhead compared to other games that may be more Nvidia optimised like BF3.CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - link
Except in the most punishing benchmark Shotun 2 total War, the GTX680 by Nvidia spanks the 7970 and wins at all 3 resolutions !*
*
Can we get a big fanboy applause for the 7970 not doing well at all in very punishing high quality games comparing to the GTX680 ?
Sabresiberian - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
The key phrase you use here is "where it matters to me". I wouldn't argue with that at all - your decision is clearly the right one for your gaming tastes.That being said, you change your wording a bit, and it seems to me to imply (softening it "IMHO") that everyone should choose by your standards; that is also clearly wrong. The games I play are World of Warcraft, and Skyrim. WoW test results can be best compared to BF3, of those benches that were used in this article. I've never played Crysis passed a demo - so choosing based on that benchmark would be shooting myself in the proverbial foot.
Clearly, the GTX 680 is the better choice for me.
I've always said, choose your hardware by application, not by overall results (unless, of course, overall results matches your application cross-section :) ), and the benches in this article are more data to back up that recommendation.
;)
3DoubleD - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Please don't buy a GTX 680 for WoW...It's even overkill for Skyrim, since you don't really need much more than 30 fps. You'd be fine using more economical variants.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Wrong, but enjoy your XFX amd D double D.The cards, all of them, are not good enough yet.
Always turning down settings and begging the vsync.
They all fail our current gams and single monitor resolutions.
Iketh - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
for pvp you most certainly do need more than 30 FPS, try 60 at the least and 75 as ideal with a 120hz monitor... the more FPS I can get, the better I perform... your statement is true for raiding only