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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SlyNine - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Wait the boost speed is 1110 vs 1005 right? So 10% faster in shader performance, which will = about 5% in benchmarking performance in the best case.Nothing to see here move along.
Janooo - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Well, 7970@1.1GHz beats plain 680.SlyNine - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Who cares, I wan't to know what the card comes shipped as. Thats what matters, anything extra you get out of that is exactly that, extra. What comes out of the box, thats what they are promising.BoFox - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Wait, you mean that HD 7970 needs to be overclocked by more than 20% in order to beat plain 680?How about overclocking that 680 by 15% like most review sites show is possible?
Then the 7970 would need to be overclocked by an impossible 35% in order to beat a 680 overclocked by 15%.
That was a nice try, Janooo!
Janooo - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
It seems you missed the point.Whatever speed 680 has 7970 can match it. These cards are equal in this regard.
When they have the same clock speed then it looks like 7970 is faster.
Look for AMD to release a faster card soon.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
We will have to subtract some mhz from the 7970 for having a larger core with more die space to make it fair, so transistor for transistor Kepler wins big.CeriseCogburn - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Plus were going to have to subtract more from The Heatie because it cheats on ram size too.Thanks Janooo you have great ideas.
BoFox - Monday, March 26, 2012 - link
Ok, if I go by your analogy and say that overclocking GTX 580 to the same speed as HD 6970 (880 MHz) makes both cards "equal in this regard."When they have the same clock speed then it looks like GTX 580 is faster.
Look for Nvidia to release a faster card soon ultilizing that 8-pin PCI-E connector on the PCB (which it did not need in order to beat HD 7970 overclocked or not).
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - link
680 has made 1,900mhz and makes well over 1,280 ouit of box reference...SlyNine - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Why, thats how it is setup stock. That is how EVERY SINGLE CARD will come.