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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Jamahl - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
And you were all too willing to do so without evening-up the initial crime. Don't insult our intelligence Ryan.SlyNine - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
You need to open your mind alittle bit. It's easy to see what would happen in Anand did something that actually limited out of the box performance.Why are you even suggesting they do such a thing. This is how the card ships, and thats how you will be getting it.
Maybe they should lower the memory clock on AMD cards to make it fair. Or wait, their are different number of shaders. Maybe Anand should somehow limit that.
It just doesn't make any sense.
MattM_Super - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Yeah you can't please all the people even some of the time when it comes to GPU reviews. This seems like a through enough review of the card as it comes out of the box. Overclocking is also important, but considering the hassle, increase in temps and noise, and possible voiding of the warranty, it seems unreasonable to demand that the OC scores be treated as more important than the stock scores.Scott314159 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Any chance of running FAH on the 680... it will only take a few minutes and would give us folders a view into its relative performance compared to the outgoing 580 (and the Radeons).I'm looking to buy a new card in the short term and FAH performance is a factor.
Thanks in advance!
Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Tried it. It wouldn't run.cudanator - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
C'mon guys, why isn't there a single CUDA-Test? And don't say "cause AMD doesn't support it" :P For me most interesting would be the CUDA-Speed compared to other nVidia-Models.Wreckage - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Not to mention PhysX. Sadly there are a lot of features AMD does not support and so they don't get benchmarked often enough. h.264 encoding is another one.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
On other sites they turn on full PhysX in Batman on the 680 and keep it off on the 7970, and the 680 still wins.LOL
If you watched the release video they show PhysX now has dynamic on the fly unique in game destruction that is not repeatable - things break apart with unique shatters and cracks. I say "it's a bout time!" to that.
My 7970 needs to go fast, in facts it's almost gone as we speak. No way am I taking the shortbus.
SlyNine - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Umm, the GNC (7xxxHD) has a fixed function H.264 encoder. Afaik the 680GTX doesn't even have a fixed function h.264 encoder. So I'm pretty sure it would mop the floor with cuda H.264 encoding.Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
We have the data, although it's not exactly a great test (a lot of CUDA applications have no idea what to do with Kepler right now). It will be up later today.