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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Gastec - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
Your every comment is an attack at ATi/AMD video cards or people who seem to be using them( maybe). Why?You get payed to do negative publicity for AMD on the review sites? Because having a Ati card die on you in the middle of some important event in you gaming life( like raiding in WoW , am I close or am I close ;-) could not be the only reason.
shin0bi272 - Friday, May 11, 2012 - link
I think the reason for the missing memory chips is because they will be releasing the 685 in aug or sep which is supposed to be 4gb and run on a 512bit bus. It could be possible to increase the size of the gpu core and double the amount of ram and stil have it on a card this length.30% faster than the 670 (685 is supposed to be 25% faster than the 680 and the 670 is 5% slower than the 680) on the same size card but using 2x8 pin connectors instead of 2x6pin. Now imagine an after market or water cooler on it... yeah.
You'll get great FPS on all those brand new console ports.
KivBlue - Friday, May 11, 2012 - link
$400 for a graphics card is just too much.medi01 - Saturday, May 12, 2012 - link
For me too. In 200$-ish range it looks like AMD 7850 / 7870 are the only reasonable options.PS
Honestly I don't get all the hype about 680/670. Cards are only marginally better than AMDs offering (losing in some games, winning in some games).
Power consumption difference according to techpowerup is only 2 watt in idle, about 9 watt at full load. Not a big deal either.
Basically a slight price drop by AMD on 7950/7970 (for whoever really wants those) once these cards actually become available and that's it.
I also wonder, how many "enthusiasts" with multi-monitor setups in the need of a faster card are out there.
PPS
Worst part of it would be nVidia releasing confusing mix of completely different cards lower end cards released under the same name, to confuse consumer.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, May 12, 2012 - link
I guess considering you think $200 equals $335 and that also equals $250, we can say your comment equals a big fat lie, and when a big fat lie is what one immediately starts off with, everyone knows something is WRONG.Gastec - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
Again you attack someone who posted a comment about AMD cards, just because. You are obviously a troll and someone from this, STILL RESPECTED computer magazine should ban you.Gastec - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
Yes but people who buy these have enough money to buy even the $3000-4000. Tesla K20 ones . Many of them have money from their parents, if you catch my drift.RegEDDIT - Sunday, May 13, 2012 - link
I managed to buy one from Amazon before they went out of stock, and I must say, I am pleased. BF3 plays like a champ, Skyrim is smooth as butter, and Adobe Premiere edits like a champ now with Nvidia hardware acceleration. This is on a 1920x1080 monitor with an old q6700 quad core @ 2.666 GHz and 800Mhz RAM. I do not expect to buy another card for a long while.CeriseCogburn - Sunday, May 13, 2012 - link
Here's COMPUTE SOFTWARE BASE in action." Adobe Premiere edits like a champ now with Nvidia hardware acceleration "
Nvidia wins. amd loses in compute.
Zebo - Sunday, May 13, 2012 - link
7950 has 40-50% OC potential being servilely down tuned @ 800Mhz.If AMD is smart they will release a 1100Mhz version and wreck 670s party.
If you're an overclocked you'd be dumb to buy 670 with its limited control and potential of 7950. Let alone of you're on water.