NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Review: Retaking The Performance Crown
by Ryan Smith on March 22, 2012 9:00 AM ESTDiRT 3
For racing games our racer of choice continues to be DiRT, which is now in its 3rd iteration. Codemasters uses the same EGO engine between its DiRT, F1, and GRID series, so the performance of EGO has been relevant for a number of racing games over the years.
First it loses, then it ties, and then it starts to win.
After a very poor start in Crysis NVIDIA has finally taken a clear lead in a game. DiRT 3 has historically favored NVIDIA’s video cards so this isn’t wholly surprising, but it’s our first proof that the GTX 680 can beat the 7970, with the GTX 680 taking a respectable 6% lead at 2560. Interestingly enough the lead increases as we drop down in resolution, which is something we have also seen with past Radeon and GeForce cards. It looks like Fermi’s trait of dropping off in performance more rapidly with resolution than GCN has carried over to the GTX 680.
In any case, compared to the GTX 580 this is another good showing for the GTX 680. The 680’s lead on the 580 is a rather consistent 36-38%.
The minimum framerates reflect what we’ve seen with the averages; the GTX 680 has a slight lead on the 7970 at 2560, while it beats the GTX 580 by over 30%.
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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.