NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Review: Retaking The Performance Crown
by Ryan Smith on March 22, 2012 9:00 AM ESTPortal 2
Portal 2 continues the long and proud tradition of Valve’s in-house Source engine. While Source continues to be a DX9 engine, Valve has continued to upgrade it over the years to improve its quality, and combined with their choice of style you’d have a hard time telling it’s over 7 years old at this point. Consequently Portal 2’s performance does get rather high on high-end cards, but we have ways of fixing that…
Portal 2 ends up being the strongest lead yet for the GTX 680, with the GTX 680 taking a 17% lead at 2560. What’s especially interesting though is performance in the bonus round with SSAA enabled – the GTX 680 takes a wholly unexpected and completely stunning 44% lead over the 7970. In fact it beats out everything here, including the GTX 590 and Radeon HD 6990. Meanwhile the lead over the GTX 580 is even more amazing, with the GTX 680 leading by 67% at these settings.
As it stands the GTX 680 is the first single-GPU card to do better than 60fps, and it does so in a landslide. All things considered, for a lack of memory bandwidth and ROP changes compared to Fermi GTX 680 does extremely well here.
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toastyghost - Sunday, April 29, 2012 - link
oh look, a fanboy fight in the comments on a hardware site. how very original.jewie27 - Sunday, July 8, 2012 - link
tonnes? WTF?santiagodraco - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
If you think overclocking RAM (which you imply but which isn't necessarily even true) makes that big of a difference than overclocking the GPU then you are fooling yourself.The GPU does the work, not the ram.
As for price/performance yes the 680 appears to be better now (they are ALWAYS leapfrogging each other) but wait until ATI releases their new variation, cuts prices to match and beats Nvidia by 20% or more... it will happen. Does every time :)
vol7ron - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
They're both important.What does a fast number cruncher mean, if it's busy waiting on the numbers?
Both CPU and RAM are important and they can both be bottlenecks.
Iketh - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
"The GPU does the work, not the ram."LOL you can't say something more stupid!
grave00 - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Sometimes I really wish the editors could come in here and mark posts with strong agreement or disagreement with statements. I'd like to know what they think of things like. GPU does all the work vs RAM doesn't do much. I have an uninformed opinion. The interested but uninformed need some kind of truth detector. Maybe just for a few pages worth. I start to lose my grip on what is real in the forum after awhile. fun though it may be.blanarahul - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - link
Question -1To understand the statement that "GPUs do all the work and memory doesn't", consider this:-
1. You overclocked your Graphics Card, but only the core and not the memory.
You ran a benchmark and let's assume you got a score of 100.
2. Now, you overclocked your memory and ran the same benchmark again.
You got the score of 101.
This is what actually happens in MOST cases. It doesn't happen always.
Question - 2
Why it doesn't happen always?
Answer:- If you use extreme methods and take your core clock too high the memory will become a bottleneck.
Cosider that you try to overclock using Liquid Nitrogen.
1. After overclocking only the core clock to the maximum.
Benchmark score:- 150
2. You overclock your memory too.
Benchmark score:- 200
In this case the memory was holding back the GPU Core from operating at it's full potential.
But this does not happen if don't use extreme methods.
I hope this helps.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, April 6, 2012 - link
Actually the 79xx series is the 1st time in a very long time amd has had a lead, let alone a lead of 20%, let alone "leap frogging".Amd has been behind since the GTX8800 and I don't know how long before that.
Let's face it, the 79xx for 2.5 months was the 1st time amd played Frogger in a long time and made it across the street without getting flattened before stepping off the curb.
You're welcome for the correct and truth filled history.
SlyNine - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Sorry but the 7970 is still much faster in crysis min fps, which I would argue is more important then average. It's faster in Metro as well.All things considered, the 7970 stands up against the 680GTX well.
Lets also consider X.264 acceleration, as far as I can tell the 680GTX has none.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
It loses in everything to 680 including 3 monitor performance.That's not standing up well, it's larger, hotter, and slower at everything, with far less features and it's $60 bucks more.
FXAA
dynamic Vsync
turbo
More features I'm sure you fans of the loser underdog don't care about as of 9 am this morning.
It's EPIC FAIL and it's not standing, it's decked to the ground and can't get up.