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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Exodite - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
I'm a bit confused regarding the multi-display output options, which is a shame as the ability to drive more than two displays at once is something that'll once again make Nvidia interesting for me personally.I regularly run two separate DVI displays for my desktop/work and a HDMI-attached TV for mainly media and some couch surfing.
Will this setup work without issues with the GTX 680?
What kind of power level will it put the card in?
On my Radeon 6950 it bumps idle clocks significantly as soon as I enable multiple displays and I don't consider it an issue, I'm just curious about what the implications are for the GTX 680.
Thanks for an awesome review, as usual!
blanarahul - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - link
Check techpowerup's review!SlitheryDee - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
This is great news. AMD's going to have fight nvidia in the pricing arena. There's going to be some great cards going for really cheap by this holiday season. Yay competition!CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Woo hooooooooooo ! :-)kallogan - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Good gpu but it's not a killer beast like it was announced...silverblue - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
I never expected it to be "as fast as three 580s in SLi" but it's still a very impressive piece of kit.I'm wondering how much performance is yet to come for both Keplar and Tahiti with driver updates, especially the latter.
ccjuju - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
I can't wait for this card to come out so I can buy a discounted 580 instead.TerdFerguson - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
"Battlefield 3 may be the most interesting game in our benchmark suite for a single reason: it’s the first AAA DX10+ game. It’s been 5 years since the launch of the first DX10 GPUs, and 3 whole process node shrinks later we’re finally to the point where games are using DX10’s functionality as a baseline rather than an addition."What, Just Cause 2 didn't count?
bhima - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Bah, I wanted to see Anand review TXAA and NVIDIA's adaptive V-sync features.Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
As you can probably tell, we're a bit behind schedule. We will be discussing both TXAA and adaptive v-sync, though for TXAA we won't technically be reviewing it since it's not available yet.