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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sngbrdb - Friday, March 30, 2012 - link
*from : PMombasa69 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
This is just a rebadged mid-range card, the 680 has less memory bandwidth than GPU's brought out 4 years ago lol, what a ripp, I can see the big fat directors at Nvidia laughing at all the mugs that have gone out and bought one, thinking this is the real big boy to replace the 580... muppets. lol.N4v1N - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
Nvidia is the bestest! No AMD is the betterest!lol...
CeriseCogburn - Friday, April 6, 2012 - link
Yes Nvidia clocked the ram over 6Ghz because their ram controller is so rockin'.In any case, the 7970 is now being overclocked, both are to 7000Ghz ram.
Unfortunately the 7970 still winds up behind most of the time, even in 2650X1200 screen triple gaming.
raghu78 - Saturday, April 7, 2012 - link
In the Reference Radeon HD 7970 AND XFX RADEON HD 7970 review the DirectX 11 compute shader Fluid simulation perfomance is far more than in this review.http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5314/xfxs-radeon-hd-...
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph5314/43383...
Reference HD 7970 -133 and XFX HD 7970 -145 . In this review Reference HD 7970 -115.5
What has changed in between these reviews. Is it that performance has actually decreased with the latest drivers
oddnutz - Thursday, April 12, 2012 - link
well i have been an ATI fanboi forever. So I am due a gfx upgrade which would of already happened if ATI priced their latest cards similar to previous generations. I will watch ATI prices over the next few weeks but it looks like i might be turning green soon.blanarahul - Friday, April 13, 2012 - link
Actually the GTX 680 REFERENCE BOARD was designed for 375 Watts of power.It has a total of 2 6-pin and one 8-pin connector on the board! I realized this after seeing the back of the board.
Commander Bubble - Thursday, April 19, 2012 - link
I agree with some of the sensible posts littered in here that Witcher 2 should be included as a comparison point, and most notably the ubersampling setup.i run 2x 580GTX SLI @1920 and i can't manage a minimum 60fps with that turned on. That would be a good test for current cards as it absoultely hammers them.
also, i don't know whether CeriseCogburn is right or wrong, and i don't care, but i'm just sick of seeing his name in the comment list. go outside and meet people, do something else. you are clearly spending way too much time on here...
beiker44 - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
I can't wait to get one...or wait for the bad ace Dual 690!!! decisions decisionsOxford Guy - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link
"At the end of the day NVIDIA already had a strong architecture in Fermi, so with Kepler they’ve gone and done the most logical thing to improve their performance: they’ve simply doubled Fermi."Fermi Lite, you mean.
"Now how does the GTX 680 fare in load noise? The answer depends on what you want to compare it to. Compared to the GTX 580, the GTX 680 is practically tied – no better and no worse – which reflects NVIDIA’s continued use of a conservative cooling strategy that favors noise over temperatures."
No, the 680's cooling performance is inferior because it doesn't use a vapor chamber. Nvidia skimped on the cooling to save money, it seems.