NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 Review Feat. EVGA: Bringing GK104 Down To $400
by Ryan Smith on May 10, 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…
With this latest generation of high-end cards Portal 2 performance is so high that it’s more than practical to play with SSAA, and that’s where we’re going to focus today. At all resolutions and anti-aliasing options the GTX 670 can surpass the 7970, but this is especially the case with SSAA. At 2560 the GTX 670 is just shy of 60fps, while the 7970 manages only 48fps and the 7950 39fps. SSAA is the ultimate lavish feature, and although Portal 2 is perfectly playable on AMD’s cards without SSAA, SSAA is also the ultimate option for image quality and there’s no good reason not to use it with cards that perform this well.
At this point it’s not entirely clear why the GTX 600 series does so well here (both AMD and NV use SGSSAA), especially given the fact that the Radeons have a memory bandwidth advantage. But regardless of the reason at 2560 the GTX 670 is looking pretty good. For that matter this also happens to be one of the stronger games for EVGA’s GTX 670 Superclocked; the performance gain at 2560 pushes past 4%.
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Spunjji - Friday, May 11, 2012 - link
Sick burn ;DyankeeDDL - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link
Why would AMD fans be sad?AMD enjoyed a multi-months lead in performance, over-charging for their cards that had, substantially, no competitions at their price levels.
Now NVIDIA made a move, and it's a very good one: AMD will need to drop the prices and I see really no reason why they couldn't, as they have just a marginally larger die size (300mm2 vs 365mm2) on the same fab/technology.
Price drop is always a win for the customers, be that an Nvidia or an AMD fanboy (or just an enthusiast).
MrSpadge - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link
That's right. With some more pressure and HD7950 at 300€ GCN may actually start to become a real option! Saying this as a Cayman owning AMD-preferer.andrewaggb - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link
It's not like the 7970 is a bad card, it's somewhat slower at games, has more ram, is much faster at gpu compute, and is still a relatively low power offering.There's always something better just around the corner. Buy what's best when you need it, and be happy about it :-). Give it 6 months to a year and there will be something better than the 670 as well.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, May 11, 2012 - link
If the 7970 is much faster at gpu compute, why did it lose 3 of 5 compute benchmarks in this review ?Hmm... loser but better, loser but better...
Also amd power loser but "still relatively a low power offering", loser but relatively a winner, loses but it's a winner anyway...
I've got it ! The loser is better and wins !
SlyNine - Saturday, May 12, 2012 - link
Seriously dude. I MIGHT could give you the first point, if it wasn't riddled full of biased.But the second point doesn't even make sense.
"Also amd power loser but "still relatively a low power offering", loser but relatively a winner, loses but it's a winner anyway..."
Now you're just throwing words in his mouth he didn't even use. What a fail!
GTX680 owner speaking.
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, May 13, 2012 - link
" and is still a relatively low power offering." (his words I responded to)Okay, maybe I went overboard.
On the other hand, we haven't heard this going the other way at all, and the 7970's loss in the power envelope is loss of a reason to buy an amd card.
Relatively, it's a high power offering, we are after all comparing the two brands, and it's high power usage allows the claims for victory in compute (even when the software base does not).
Galidou - Sunday, May 13, 2012 - link
''Okay, maybe I went overboard.''You do that all day long going overboard...
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, May 13, 2012 - link
You do nothing but lie and attack, so you have zero room to talk.Galidou - Monday, May 14, 2012 - link
And I am the one who attack, I attack but not you? LOL you're so fun, don'T make me copy and paste every word lack of respect the abuse of words such as massive ignorance, stupid, everyone lies but not you... and everyone lacks of respect but not you... OMG that's extreme