EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Classified Review: Pushing GTX 680 To Its Peak
by Ryan Smith on July 20, 2012 12:00 PM ESTPortal 2, Battlefield 3, Starcraft II, Skyrim, Civilization V, & Compute
Moving on to the back-half of our benchmarks, these are the games that the Kepler architecture traditionally excels at. Hopefully this means we’ll get to see the GTX 680 Classified spread its wings a bit more here.
Given how much of an emphasis SSAA puts on GPU performance it comes as no great surprise that the GTX 680 Classified does fairly well here, picking up an additional 9-10% compared to the reference GTX 680. At 52.4fps it’s just shy of what would be needed to smoothly play Portal 2 at 5670x1200 with SSAA.
Meanwhile its gains in BF3 are tempered somewhat, only picking up 7% at 2560. Though this is still enough to push it past 70fps. 1920 resolution gamers looking for a 120fps experience will also see some improvement, but it’s still not enough to average 120fps on a single card.
Oddly our SC2 framerates are almost flat. SC2 is most often CPU bound so that does come into play to some degree, but we would have expected a bit of a gain at 2560 given the 4% gain at 1920.
However the typically CPU-bound Skyrim actuals eeks out a small 3% performance improvement at 2560. Still, even a reference GTX 680 is overkill for Skyrim without 3rd part modifications.
Finally, Civilization V sees some performance improvements, but again it’s less than the full force of the factory GPU overclock. 6% at 2560 will be all that the GTX 680 Classified can do.
Moving on to compute quickly, since most compute tasks are GPU-bound the factory overclock does help to some degree. The Radeon HD 7970GE is still more than a potent adversary though.
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Oxford Guy - Wednesday, July 25, 2012 - link
"The 680 is cooler and quieter and higher performing all at the same time than anything we've seen in a long time..."Gee whiz. I wonder why 28nm is more efficient than 40nm.
jmsabatini - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
You really needed to test Skyrim with a TON of ultra high res texture mods.Without that, your results were right in line with my expectations, i.e. not worth the extra $$$ over the vanilla card.
CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, July 25, 2012 - link
Something the regular joe moronic masses cannot seem to comprehend for the life of them, is when the cores peter out before the ram can be effectively used while maintaining a playable framerate, no amount of memory no matter how much "can help".Let me put it another way:
The card makers need a more powerful core to use more than 2GB memory.(actually less than 2, but I won't go into that)
The results are all over the web, and have been for months. No one should still be so utterly blind to the disclosed facts, still.
hammbone852 - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
This is disappointing but i'm guessing the drivers aren't pushing the GPU to Its fill potential. This card should be in the top 3 in all tests.Pey - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link
As a SLI user, I will buy two of these and I´ll tell you why.I tried 2 MSI 680 Lightning are the temps go up to 75-76 each card, while 2 680 reference cards reach 72°. So you guys forget that for sli users, you have to get cards with a blower -unless you have watercooling.
I know the price is not ideal, but for people like who are looking for a couple 680 with overclock and a proper watercooler-free solution, this is the card to go.
You could go for a MSI Lightning, but when you put in another card, temps will go up to 15-20° on each card, and i dont like playing while having 76-78° plus the noise.