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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
404 Comments
View All Comments
XiZeL - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Here is a questionhow many screens can i connect at once on this?
silverblue - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Good question. I've seen mentions of four at once, three in 3D, but I'm not sure.noeldillabough - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
I'd also really like to know the answer to this. Also, where to buy? Everywhere seems to have a "out of stock"Ryan Smith - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
It supports 4 screens, though Surround mode (SLS) is limited to 3 screens and then the 4th is a separate surface.Slayer68 - Saturday, March 24, 2012 - link
As far as spanning goes it's 3 of the SAME screens. Might be able to use all 4 ports in non spanned mode for the desktop but not sure why you'd do that for gaming since it would only show up on 1 monitor.Pessimism - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Nvidia knowingly sold defective products to multiple large vendors over a lengthy course of time. Never honor them with your money. The CEO has never publicly acknowledged or apologized for this mistake.CeriseCogburn - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
AMD ati in the gaming console space as well.I guess you get to enjoy VIA chrome with your held back punishment dollars.
Don't buy HP as their defective heatsinks were the cause.
Your console vendor choices are also cut down no xboxes.
BoFox - Monday, March 26, 2012 - link
LOL!!! That was funny!Yeah, and don't buy AMD because they lied about the Bulldozer transistor number! Dave Baumann recently posted over at B3D with the exact words that it's "just a marketing number".
silverblue - Monday, March 26, 2012 - link
I was under the impression that PR just got the number wrong...Soldier1969 - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Clerly beats AMD's best. I'll take 2 plsase to replace my 2 580s 3gb versions. Pure ownage at my 2560 x 1600 res. Nice read thanks.