NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Review: Ultra Expensive, Ultra Rare, Ultra Fast
by Ryan Smith on May 3, 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…
We’re just going to jump straight into SSAA here, as even the 7970CF can get 61fps at 5760 with it. This is the first game that the GTX 690 solidly beats the 7970CF for reasons other than bugs; at 5760 with impeccable image quality the GTX 690 is ahead of the 7970CF by 38%, and even at 2560 that’s a 27% lead. In fact you could nearly play Portal 2 with SSAA and with 3D Vision at 2560, at 60fps, if there was even a 3DV monitor at that resolution.
With that said, SSAA really clobbers the GTX 690. This is the worst performance we’ll see relative to the GTX 680 SLI, as the GTX 690 only reaches 93% of the GTX 680 SLI’s performance at 5760, and 90% at 2560. Thankfully for the GTX 690 it’s the difference between 120fps, and more than 120fps.
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Ryan Smith - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
Correct, we're using the Steam version. I reloaded it as of last week.bpwnes - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
...but will it blend?Luscious - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
I'll take three, thanks!!!tipoo - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
Send me 10 grand and I'll send you three of the nitrogen enriched versions.Makaveli - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
Is this a review for the 7970 CF or 690 lolFor a $1000 card that is not a very good showing. i'm thinking that 2GB limit per gpu is really starting to hurt them not to mention the 256bit memory bus.
shin0bi272 - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
That's what I was thinking. Imagine what they could have done if they'd of expanded the bus to 384bit per gpu... such a sad showing.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
There are plenty of 4BG 680 reviews out there that certainly disprove your thinking, and lack of knowledge.silverblue - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
This card has 2GB per GPU, not 4. Also, the lack of memory (!) will limit performance before the memory bus does. Compared to previous NVIDIA products, the 680 has far faster memory which mitigates having a narrower bus.shin0bi272 - Saturday, May 5, 2012 - link
I guess we'll see when the gk110 arrives this summerCeriseCogburn - Saturday, May 5, 2012 - link
There is no limit with the 2G of memory, but none of you have looked at teh dozens of reviews and hundreds of blogs proofs, so you will keep babbling stupid things, forever, it appears.