NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Review: Retaking The Performance Crown
by Ryan Smith on March 22, 2012 9:00 AM ESTCivilization V
Our final game, Civilization 5, 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.
Remember when NVIDIA used to sweep AMD in Civ V? Times have certainly changed in the last year, that’s for sure. It only seems appropriate that we’re ending on what’s largely a tie. At 2560 the GTX 680 does have a 4% lead over the 7970, however the 7970 reclaims it’s lead at the last possible moment at 1920. At this point we’ve seen the full spectrum of results, from the GTX 680 losing badly to winning handily, and everything in between.
On a final note, it’s interesting to see that the GTX 680 really only manages to improve on the GTX 580’s performance at 2560. At 1920 the lead is only 8%, and at 1680 we’re just CPU limited. Haswell can’t get here soon enough.
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falx - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
On the "Meet the GeForce GTX 680" page I think it should have said "This is as opposed to the vapor chamber on the GTX 580" not the 680. Had to reread it multiple times so now I'm not even sure. Can anyone verify my sanity?Ramon Zarat - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
The title "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Review: Retaking The Performance Crown" is misleading. Said like that, in means the 680 is the fastest card on the planet. It's not.The 590 and 6990 are trading blows at the top. Actually, because of that, there's currently no graphic card king, it's in fact a stalemate. A stalemate that is about to end with the imminent introduction of the AMD 7990.
To be honest to their readers, the title should have been "...Retaking The single GPU Performance Crown". NOTE TO THE AUTHOR: for the sake of logic and consistency, you better say the new 7990 is "Retaking The Performance Crown" without mentioning it's a dual GPU...
That "small" journalistic inaccuracy details aside, nice review, but limited. We have no idea how the new generation scale with SLI where AMD improved tremendously with the 7XXX series. We have no idea how it performs with 2, 3 or 4 monitors compared to AMD 7970 with its faster and bigger RAM buffer. We very few hints on how the 680 would perform with wide spread GPGPU apps product such has video transcoding, folding or even Physx!
For what we know this far, the 680 is clearly the best balanced price / performance / power ratio GPU ever produced by Nvidia, but comes a little short in some vertical department.
arjuna1 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Don't be surprised, this is Anandtech.N4g4rok - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Overall, i'm not real sure i understand the cutthroat nature of comments to these kind of things, let alone slightly overzealous writing.Just seems like a silly thing to get worked up about.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Some people are into it as a hobby and it obviously is very important look at the endless people it employs and you're at a website that thrives on people caring deeply about all of this.The gentleman had a good point, it's single core card king only.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
The GTX590 is clearly faster than the 6990, but we know who wants to claim it's a tie.The GTX580 is also clearly faster and by more, than the 6970. (CF vs SLI lowering the gap but never closing it in the dual core cards)
It's nice to see how big the lies have become in the fanboy space.
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I do agree with you that the 680 is only core single card king for now, but the GTX590 is clearly single card king, despite the endless lying to the contrary.
If you read the endless fudging on the initial articles, the writers even say " 590 beats the 6990 but not by a wide enough margin to convincingly "dethrone it".
It wins but it doesn't win, It's faster overall but it's not the king... fanboyism
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That's the kind of fan boy crud contradiction we get when science and truth is tossed aside for some sort of who knows what "reason" which is anything but reasoned.
piroroadkill - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Huh, sorry, but I'm not seeing it: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4239/nvidias-geforce...6990 vs 590, I'd say looking at the graphs, 6990 wins most of the time, but when 590 does win, it's usually convincingly.
Given that's pretty much a wash, I'd take the 6990 any day because of the increased VRAM. Believe me, you definitely need it when cranking up all the quality settings, ESPECIALLY if you're going to run multiple monitors.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
We've heard the last line for a long time speculatively even in reviews, but now the 680 has put that lie to rest in triple monitor wins.The other problem is once you've cranked settings enough for theoretical ram limiting, you're below playable frame rates.
So no, what you claim is just more fud because of those facts.
mindbomb - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
is it still vp5?i want some hardware vp8 decoding.
:3
RikkiTikkiTavi - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
This brings back competition to the graphics card market. After years of Nvidia selling their scorching-hot cards at hardly profitable prices, they can finally turn around and hunt AMD for a change. I can't wait to see their answer to this.(to prevent any cries from Nvidia-Fanboys about me being unfair to them: I own a 560Ti, after my 8800GT, 7600, 6800, 4200TI, and Riva TNT, so there)