NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Review: Retaking The Performance Crown
by Ryan Smith on March 22, 2012 9:00 AM ESTBattlefield 3
Its popularity aside, 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. Not surprisingly BF3 is one of the best looking games in our suite, but as with past Battlefield games that beauty comes with a high performance cost
NVIDIA’s cards have always done well at Battlefield 3, which puts the Radeon HD 7900 series in a bad position from the beginning. Short of the GTX 680’s massive lead in the Portal 2 bonus round, this is the single biggest victory for the GTX 680 over the 7970, beating AMD’s best by 28% at 2560, and by continually higher amounts at lower resolutions. Based on our experience with BF3 I’d hesitate to call the 680 fully fluid at 2560 as large firefights can significantly tear into performance relative to Thunder Run, but if it’s not fully fluid then it’s going to be very, very close.
What’s also interesting here is that once again the GTX 680 is doing very well compared to the dual-GPU cards. The GTX 590 and 6990 never pull away from the GTX 680, and at 1920 with FXAA the GTX 680 finally squeaks by and takes the top of the chart. Performance relative to the GTX 580 is also once again good for that matter, with the GTX 680 beating its predecessor by 48% at almost every resolution.
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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.