NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 Review Feat. EVGA: Bringing GK104 Down To $400
by Ryan Smith on May 10, 2012 9:00 AM ESTFinal Words
Looking at this data I’m reminded a great deal of the Radeon HD 6900 series launch. AMD launched the 6900 series after the GTX 500 series, but launch order aside the end result was very similar. NVIDIA’s second tier GTX 570 and AMD’s first tier Radeon HD 6970 were tied on average but were anything but equals. This is almost exactly what we’re seeing with the GTX 670 and the Radeon HD 7970.
Depending on the game and resolution we’re looking at the GTX 670 reaches anywhere between 80% and 120% of the 7970’s performance. AMD sails by the GTX 670 in Crysis and to a lesser extent Metro, only for the GTX 670 to shoot ahead in BF3 and Portal 2 (w/SSAA). Officially NVIDIA’s positioning on the GTX 670 is that it’s to go against the 7950 and not the 7970, and that’s a wise move on NVIDIA’s behalf; but the GTX 670 is surely nipping at the 7970’s heels.
With that said, there are a couple of differences from the 6900 series launch which are equally important. The first is that unlike last time the GTX 670 and Radeon HD 7970 are not equally priced. At MSRP the GTX 670 is $80 cheaper, while at cheapest retail it’s closer to $60. The second difference is that this time the competing cards are not nearly as close in power consumption or noise, and thanks to GK104 NVIDIA has a notable advantage there.
Much like the GTX 570 and the Radeon HD 6970, if you’re in the market for cards at these performance levels you need to take a look at both cards and see what kind of performance each card gets on the games you want to play. From our results the GTX 670 is doing better at contemporary games and is cheaper to boot, but the Radeon HD 7970 can hold its own here at multi-monitor resolutions and games like Crysis or Metro. Or for that matter it can still run circles around the GTX 670 in GK104's real weakness: compute tasks
On the other hand if you’re buying a gaming card on price then this isn’t a contest. For the Radeon HD 7950 this is the GTX 680 all over again. NVIDIA can’t quite beat the 7950 in every game (e.g. Crysis), but when it loses it’s close, and when it wins it’s 15%, 25%, even 50% faster. At the same time gaming power consumption is also lower as is noise. As it stands the worst case scenario for the GTX 670 is that it performs like a 7950 while the best case scenario is that it performs like a 7970. And it does this priced like a 7950, which means that something is going to have to give the moment NVIDIA’s product supply is no longer in question.
Outside of the obligatory AMD matchup, interestingly enough NVIDIA has put themselves in harm’s way here in the process. At 2560x1600 the GTX 680 only beats the GTX 670 by 7% on average. NVIDIA has always charged a premium for their top card but the performance gap has also been greater. In games that aren’t shader bound the GTX 670 does very well for itself thanks to the fact that it has equal memory bandwidth and only a slight ROP performance deficit, which means the GTX 680 is only particularly strong in Metro, Portal 2, and DiRT 3. The 7% performance lead certainly doesn’t justify the 25% price difference, and if you will give up that performance NVIDIA will shave $100 off of the price of a card, but if you do want that top performance NVIDIA intends to make you pay for it. Of course this is also why the GTX 670 is only priced $100 cheaper rather than $150. Potential buyers looking for a $350 GK104 card are going to be left out in the cold for now, particularly buyers looking for a meaningful GTX 570 upgrade.
Finally, the nature of NVIDIA’s power target technology has put partners like EVGA in an odd place. Even with a moderate 6%+ factory overclock the GTX 670 Superclocked just isn’t all that much faster than the reference GTX 670, averaging only a 3% gain at 2560. Since the GTX 670 virtually always operates above its base clock the culprit is NVIDIA’s power target, which keeps the GTX 670SC from boosting much higher than our reference GTX 670. Once you increase the power target the GTX 670SC can easily make an interesting niche for itself, but while this isn’t true overclocking it isn’t stock performance either. In any case it’s clear that for factory overclocked cards to really push the limit they’re going to need to go fully custom, which is what a number of partners are going to do in the coming months.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
414 Comments
View All Comments
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, May 13, 2012 - link
Are you going to put up with crashing amd drivers and a burning electric bill OC with added instability and a water tower cost and then all of a sudden save a miniscule bit on card cost ? Are you going to add to your suffering with no adaptive v-sync, no also added smooth frame rate target, no instant per game optimum settings from a massive nVidia server farm embedded automagically in the superior nVidia drivers ?Are you going to stand for no bezel peek feature ?
Are you going to put up with the more expensive and hassled 3 monitor connection issues of the amd cards ?
Are you going to sit there undisturbed by the epic failure of amd 3D gaming vs Nvidia's available and awesome implementation ?
Are you going to put up with no amd 120hz monitor support there too ?
Isn't your original stance there the very opposite of "no one buys these cards to run on just one monitor and certainly not 1900x1200" argument ?
Since the amd overlcocks "so well" as you claim vs nVidia, what is amd releasing a pre overclocked version going to do other than allow amd partners to charge more ?
ROFL - it will do nothing.
saturn85 - Monday, May 14, 2012 - link
the folding@home benchmark is great!!i think the performance unit "point per day (ppd)" is preferable compare to "nanosecond per day (ns/day)".
TheMan876 - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
Glad to see 3 monitor resolutions getting benchmarked since I just moved to that setup. Can't wait to see SLI on this card!Death666Angel - Thursday, May 17, 2012 - link
Prices for the GTX 670 and the HD 7970 are similar in Germany, at max a difference of about 30€. :-)If I had to buy a card today, I'd probably get a GTX 680, but I don't regret the 500€ I spent on a 7970 with a watercooling block and OC capabilities of 1300/1700. :-)
Brainling - Thursday, May 24, 2012 - link
I had been waiting patiently for the release of the 670 or the 660ti, depending on availability, cost and performance. After reading this review of the 670, I bought one on the spot (release day morning, while Newegg still had some)....it was a good decision.This card replaced an HD6870, and while that was a decent card, it's like night and day. In informal tests I did, I found this card to be twice as powerful in most scenarios. Nvidia has really outdone themselves with their new Kepler architecture. They've created one of the most powerful hyper-parallel architectures available to do, and have done so at greatly decreased power draw and heat (aka: less noise). It's rare to ever see my 670 spike above 60C, with the stock blower cooler.
All in all a great purchase, and one I'm very glad I made.
smartypnt4 - Sunday, May 27, 2012 - link
I know they're on the site in other reviews, but it would be nice if you could include a few dual-GPU cards in the benchmark comparisons. It probably only matters to a few people like me, but it'd be nice to have.For me, I want them because I'm trying to make a decision: do I get a second 6950 to crossfire with the one I already have for $200, or do I go out and buy a new card?
From what I've seen, outside the edge case games such as Batman and some of the games running on Frostbite, a 6990 pretty much trades blows with the 680 and the 7970. So, I'm thinking that for me, since I have the headroom in my PSU, getting a second 6950 makes a whole lot of sense, even though the setup will consume almost twice as much power as one new card.
Just my two cents.
codeus - Monday, June 4, 2012 - link
Good review but so much focus on EVGA's warranty changes smacks of this being a sponsored (and therefore biased?) review.pilotofdoom - Monday, June 11, 2012 - link
Anyone else notice that the GTX 670 outperformed the GTX 680 in the Microsoft’s Detail Tessellation test on Normal settings?I'm guessing it's a simple mistake, since there's no mention of the reversal in the text. Not like it really matters anyways, being a synthetic benchmark compared to actual gaming performance.
chrisrobhay2 - Friday, June 29, 2012 - link
Which leader does Anandtech use for the Civilization V Compute test? I'm just curious because my overclocked GTX 670 wipes the floor with all of these cards in almost all of the leader tests, so I want to make sure that I'm looking at the right information.warmbit - Tuesday, July 17, 2012 - link
If you want to see what we really have GTX670 performance in games is worth taking a look at this overview:http://warmbit.blogspot.com/2012/05/analiza-wyniko...
On the right side, select your language for translation (Google Translate).