NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Review: Retaking The Performance Crown
by Ryan Smith on March 22, 2012 9:00 AM ESTPortal 2
Portal 2 continues the long and proud tradition of Valve’s in-house Source engine. While Source continues to be a DX9 engine, Valve has continued to upgrade it over the years to improve its quality, and combined with their choice of style you’d have a hard time telling it’s over 7 years old at this point. Consequently Portal 2’s performance does get rather high on high-end cards, but we have ways of fixing that…
Portal 2 ends up being the strongest lead yet for the GTX 680, with the GTX 680 taking a 17% lead at 2560. What’s especially interesting though is performance in the bonus round with SSAA enabled – the GTX 680 takes a wholly unexpected and completely stunning 44% lead over the 7970. In fact it beats out everything here, including the GTX 590 and Radeon HD 6990. Meanwhile the lead over the GTX 580 is even more amazing, with the GTX 680 leading by 67% at these settings.
As it stands the GTX 680 is the first single-GPU card to do better than 60fps, and it does so in a landslide. All things considered, for a lack of memory bandwidth and ROP changes compared to Fermi GTX 680 does extremely well here.
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coldpower27 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Well, it's possible, but for financial reasons they won't do so.If they had created a 28nm product with similar thermals as the GTX 580 as well as similar die size you would indeed see a massive increase in performance..
However this generation nVidia wanted to improve on all aspects to some degree so as such not as much can go into performance.
We have an massive improvement in die area, a mile improvement in performance and a decent improvement in energy consumption and considerable improvement in energy efficiency. A very well balanced product.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
The GTX580 is $470, so who believes Nvidia was dropping a killer card in at $299 like Charlie D the red fan lie disseminator said in his rumor starting post ?His lie has worked magic on all minds.
silverblue - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
The 680 shouldn't be $300 any more than the 580 should be $470.CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - link
Spinning so hard you're agreeing while drilling yourself into a dark hole.SlyNine - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Agreed, back when the 9700pro came out we seen the first signs of this. The cards began needing external power adapters. The HSF's started growing to get those 4x increases.It was only a matter of time until they hit a wall with that method, and here we are.
johnpombrio - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Rumor is that BIG Kepler will be named GTX685 and be out in August.Philbar71 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
"it takes a 16% lead over the GTX 7970 here"Whats a GTX 7970????
prophet001 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
hahai saw that too... must have been a late night last night. we can let it slide :)
N4g4rok - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
It's pretty impressive. I'd like to see what it will cost from one of the retail sites. I'm not necessarily regretting the 7950 i got, but that nice little FPS bump you get from the 680 is nothing to turn your nose up at.Jorgisven - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
"Overall GTX 580 is targeted at a power envelope somewhere between GTX 560 Ti and GTX 580, though it’s closer to the former than the latter." Is this a typo (580 instead of the intended 680)? Or am I just not understanding this correctly?