NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Review: Ultra Expensive, Ultra Rare, Ultra Fast
by Ryan Smith on May 3, 2012 9:00 AM ESTGeForce Experience & The Test
Before jumping into our test results, there’s one last thing we wanted to touch upon quickly. Along with announcing the GTX 690 at the NVIDIA Gaming Festival 2012, NVIDIA also used the occasion to announce a new software utility called GeForce Experience.
For some time now NVIDIA has offered a feature they call Optimal Playable Settings through GeForce.com, which are a series of game setting configurations that NVIDIA has tested and is recommending for various GeForce video cards. It’s a genuinely useful service, but it’s also not well known and only covers desktop GPUs.
With GeForce Experience NVIDIA is going to be taking that concept one step further and offering an application that interfaces with both the game and the successor to NVIDIA’s OPS service. The key difference being that rather than having the settings on a website and requiring the user to punch in those settings by hand, GeForce Experience can fetch those settings from NVIDIA and make the settings changes on its own. This would make the process much more accessible, as not only do users not need to know anything about how to access their settings or what they do, but the moment NVIDIA includes this with their drivers it will be far more widespread than OPS ever was.
The other change is that NVIDIA is going to be moving away from manual testing in favor of automated testing. OPS are generated by hand, whereas GeForce Experience settings are going to be based on automated testing, allowing NVIDIA to cover a wider range of games and video cards, most importantly by including mobile video cards. NVIDIA already has GPU farms for driver regression testing, so this is a logical extension of that concept to use those farms to generate and test game settings.
GeForce Experience will be launching in beta form on June 6th.
The Test
The press drivers for the GTX 690 are 301.33, though it sounds like NVIDIA will actually launch with a slightly newer version today. As the GTX 690 is launching so soon after the GTX 680 these drivers are virtually identical to the GTX 680 launch drivers. Meanwhile for the GeForce 500 series we’re using 301.24, and for the AMD Radeon cards Catalyst 12.4
We’d also like to give a shout-out to Asus, who sent us one of their wonderful PA246Q 24” P-IPS monitors to allow us to complete our monitor set for multi-monitor testing. From here on we’ll be able to offer multi-monitor results for our high-end cards, and a number of cards have already had that data added in Bench.
Next, based on an informal poll on our forums we’re going to be continuing our existing SLI/CF testing methodology. All of our test results will be with both cards directly next to each other as opposed to spaced apart in order to test the worst case scenario. Users with such a configuration are a minority based on our data, but there are still enough of them that we believe it should be covered.
Finally, we’d like to note that since we don’t have a matching pair of 7970 reference cards, we’re using our one reference card along with XFX’s R7970 BEDD. For gaming performance, power consumption, and temperatures this doesn’t have a material impact, but it means we don’t have meaningful noise performance for the 7970.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | EVGA X79 SLI |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.2.3.1022 |
| Power Supply: | Antec True Power Quattro 1200 |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung 470 (256GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1867 4 x 4GB (8-10-9-26) |
| Case: | Thermaltake Spedo Advance |
| Monitor: |
Samsung 305T Asus PA246Q |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 7970 AMD Radeon HD 6990 AMD Radeon HD 6970 AMD Radeon HD 5970 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 301.24 NVIDIA ForceWare 301.33 AMD Catalyst 12.4 |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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theSeb - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
I must say I found it quite odd and hilarious to see people accusing Anandtech of favouring AMD by using a monitor with a 1200 vertical resolution. 16:10 monitors are not that uncommon and we really should be showing the industry what we think by not purchasing 16:9 monitors.Anyway, if anything this review seems to be Nvidia biased, in my opinion. The 7970 CF does not do too badly, In fact it beats the 690 / 680 CF in many games and only loses out in the games where it's "broken". I am not sure why you cannot recommend it based on the numbers in your benchmarks since it hardly embarrasses itself.
silverblue - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
It's not "people", it's "person"... and he's only here to troll graphics card articles.When AMD gets it right, CrossFire is absolutely blistering. Unfortunately, the sad state of affairs is that AMD isn't getting it right with a good proportion of the games in this review.
NVIDIA may not get quite as high scaling as AMD when AMD does get it right, but they're just far more consistent at providing good performance. This is the main gripe about AMD; with a few more resources devoted to the project, surely they can overcome this?
CeriseCogburn - Friday, May 4, 2012 - link
Yes, of course, call names forever, but never dispute the facts.I will agree with you though, amd drivers suck especially in CF, and they suck for a lot of games for a long long time.
silverblue - Friday, May 4, 2012 - link
No, I said AMD's drivers have issues with Crossfire, not that they suck in general.I've also checked three random British websites and there's no issues whatsoever in finding a 1920x1200 monitor. I also looked at NewEgg and found eight immediately. It's really not difficult to find one.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, May 5, 2012 - link
1920x1200 all of you protesteth far too much.The cat is out of the bag and you won't be putting it back in.
Enjoy the bias, you obviously do, and leave me alone, stop the stalking.
seapeople - Saturday, May 5, 2012 - link
I'm with ya bro. Forget these high resolution monitor nancy's who don't know what they're missing. I'm rockin' games just fine with 60+ fps on my 720p plasma tv, and that's at 600hz! Just you try to get 24xAAAA in 3D (that's 1200hz total) on that 1920x1200 monitor of yours!Framerate fanboys unite!
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, May 6, 2012 - link
Ahh, upped the ante to plasma monitors ? ROFL - desperation of you people knows no bounds.saf227 - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
On page 2 of the review - where you have all the pictures of the card - we have no real basis for figuring out the cards true size. Could you include a reference in one of those photos? Say, a ruler or a pencil or something, so we have an idea what the size of the card truly is?Ryan Smith - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
The card is 10" long, the same length as the GTX 590 (that should be listed on page 2). But I'll take that under consideration for future articles.ueharaf - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
why they back to 256 bits and the gtx 590 have 384 bits?!?!cause they dont want to have a lot of advantage?
maybe the next gtx 790 will have again 384 bits and it would be better than gtx690 ....come on!!!