Portal 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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  • Blackchild1101 - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link

    I'll take two please!
  • Ryan Smith - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link

    You'll get nothing and like it!

    (Sorry, was watching Caddyshack last weekend)
  • Wreckage - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link

    To think a few months ago you could have gotten a pair of 7970s for $1100.

    I'm betting there are a lot of sad AMD fans out there. Their viral marketing group in the forums is going to have a rough year for sure.
  • retrospooty - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link

    I doubt anyone that places happiness in their preferred companies products being #1 is all too happy to begin with ;)
  • RampantAndroid - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link

    Sure, but realizing that waiting a few months could have saved them serious $$$.

    Same probably goes for GTX680 owners.
  • CeriseCogburn - Monday, May 28, 2012 - link

    The partners of nVidia are going to be happy, because what comes out of the 680 and 670 is an auto overclock and an overclockable card, with locks on power increases, and therefore far, far less chance of anything burning out.

    Overclock to your hearts desire - you won't be burning these up while the amd cards will still be a housefire and cost the partners plenty to replace.

    nVidia's partners are very, very happy.
  • JlHADJOE - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link

    They would if they have stocks invested though.

    /putting money where fanboy mouth is
  • Lazlo Panaflex - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link

    Waaaaaah waaaaah I can't post in the forums waaaaaaaah waaaaaaaaah

    btw, your mom says 'hi' & said to get back in the basement
  • wut - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link

    Oh no, YOUR MOM.
  • Lazlo Panaflex - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link

    bwahahahahahahahaha :D

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