NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Review: Retaking The Performance Crown
by Ryan Smith on March 22, 2012 9:00 AM ESTMetro 2033
Paired with Crysis as our second behemoth FPS is Metro: 2033. Metro gives up Crysis’ lush tropics and frozen wastelands for an underground experience, but even underground it can be quite brutal on GPUs, which is why it’s also our new benchmark of choice for looking at power/temperature/noise during a game. If its sequel due this year is anywhere near as GPU intensive then a single GPU may not be enough to run the game with every quality feature turned up.
Thankfully for NVIDIA Metro is much, much better than Crysis for the GTX 680. The GTX 680 still trails the 7970 by a few percent at 2560, but it’s now clearly ahead of the 7950. Performance relative to the GTX 580 is far better, with the GTX 680 leading by 34%. In our experience Metro is very shader heavy, and this would appear to be confirmation of that as the GTX 680 has far greater shader resources than GTX 580.
What’s particularly interesting here though is that the GTX 680 has nearly caught up with the GTX 590. NVIDIA’s SLI scaling for Metro isn’t particularly fantastic, but it’s still quite a leap compared to the GTX 580. Consequently this is the first sign that the GTX 680 can compete with the GTX 590, which would be quite an accomplishment.
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CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - link
What you're saying is true for amd cards, and is severe in CF, but true across the board.Lower clocked cpu system, better results from Nvidia.
bozolino - Monday, March 26, 2012 - link
I dont know whats happening. I have a gtx 560 2win and wanted to compare it to the 680 and see if its worth the replace but the charts cant be compared, for example:http://www.anandtech.com/show/5048/evgas-geforce-g...
This review uses an i7 3xxx while the older uses an i7 720, how can the older cpu performs better than the new one?? Something is very odd....
I wish they had used same computer as vga test bench, so we could compare all the results together....
Sharpie - Monday, March 26, 2012 - link
Its about design trade offs, you can increase the memory speed if you have a narrow bus to get the same throughput of something with lower clock speed and a large bus. all depeends on the architectural design so arguing about clock numbers is pointless generally speaking unless you are comparing apples to apples. Comapring an NVidia chip to an ATI chip is apples to oranges. Yes, im an engineer.CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - link
Oh I get it you're in some pretend world where the card companies are not "fanboy compared" in the article itself.Once the amd card loses, and someone tells the truth about that, it's trolling or fanboy right ?
If an amd fan lies, it's "a good opinion".
If an amd fan liar gets corrected, that's "taking it too far" into "fanboy".
Once aghain, telling the truth on the two competing cards is forbidden only if it's an Nvidia advantage - then WE MUST OMIT the AMD card from the analysis, right ?
I think you might as well NEVER read another article on a card launch at this site, if you intend to stick to your RUDE comment.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - link
Heck you didn't read this article nor many others then that say and prove the exact thing.I'm sure it will never make sense to you.
SlyNine - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
Actually, I'm pretty sure it's you that doesn't understand the DX API. The CPU's are doing roughly the same thing for both videocards. Cept when it comes to processing the Drivers.CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - link
The GTX690 currently holds the world record with a 1,900mhz overclock, and is gaining easily 15% with noob out of box overlclocks, and reaching very high memory clocks as well as 1,300+ core, I've seen 1,420 on air, and overclocked models are on their way....So much for that fud about 7970... it's FUD FUD and pure FUD.
blanarahul - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - link
GTX 690????blanarahul - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - link
Smart move by NVIDIA. Make a single gpu powerful graphics card to battle the Dual Tahiti monster. Judging by how they are doing the GTX 680 it should have the following specs:-4.72 billion transiostors
2048 CUDA Cores
384-bit memory bus width
3 GB VRAM
600-700 USD
TDP of 225-250W
If the clock speeds high enough, it will be quite a match for the 7990!
The reason i think it will be a single GPU card is because GTX 680=2x GTX 560 Ti.
So it should be GTX 690=2x GTX 580.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - link
The release date of the 7970 was jan 11th, 2.5 months is opverstating in AMD's favor...Nothing like not knowing what you're talking about huh.
7970's have come down in price a bit, but you still will find them for much more than $569 at an awful lot of USA online places.