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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george1976 - Saturday, March 24, 2012 - link
Excuse me sir but I think you've been reading the wrong article.Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Just a heads up guys, we're a bit behind schedule and are still adding images and tables, so hold on.casteve - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
whew - thought my coffee hadn't kicked in :)Granseth - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Hi, liked the review but are missing a few things, though I expect them to be reviewed at a later time in a new article. Like the improved multi-screen support, SLI, overclocking and things like that.But I would like to know more about this turbo as well. What I am courious about is if it will boost minimum framerate as well as average framerate, or if the GPU is so taxed when it hits minimum framerate that it won't have anything extra to offer up to its turbo.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Minimum framerates. -16% power target on the left, stock on the right.Crysis Min: 21.4...21.9
Dirt3 Min: 73.4....77.1
So to answer your question, it depends on the game.
Jamahl - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Just a comment on the power draw - I wonder if you could test the 680 and 7970 in a different game, say for example Batman of BF3. The reason for this is due to the 7970 winning in Metro, while losing in most of the others and I wonder if there is something going on regarding power draw.CeriseCogburn - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
See the GTX 680 win in Metro 2033 all the way on up 1920 and 2560 resolutions >http://hothardware.com/Reviews/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-...
What's different is AAA is used, as well as the Sandy E runs stock at 3,300 and is not overclocked.
What appears to be a big problem for AMD cards is they have been offloading work to the cpu much more than the Nvidia cards, and even more so in CF v SLI, so when you don't have a monster CPU with a monster overclock to boot the AMD cards lose even worse.
SlyNine - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Anandtech uses AAA for Metro.You need to look agian, the difference is no DOF and hothardware is running at lower settings.
you, fail.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - link
Oh I didn't fail, I showed the 680 winning in the game that is claimed it loses in.That's a WIN for me, period.
SlyNine - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
Ok so your 500$ video card can win at lower settings than the 459$ videocard.