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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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.