GeForce GTX 680 2 GB Review: Kepler Sends Tahiti On Vacation

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Being somewhat partial to AMD, I think they are just filled with mediocrity atm, they are trying to do LESS to keep prices down instead of releasing a product being the best it can be. They are getting wiped around the floor in the GPU and CPU markets.......sad
 
The crown sits not on Nvidia head yet it sits on MSI lightning 7970s head & we all know it. Until theres a lightning 680 of-course.
 
HD4k is a deal breaker for me test with that resolution please I'm not upgrading for 2560x1600 as my current setup works well in that resolution.
 
I'm slightly disappointed but a lot impressed. Not sure if I will be getting the GTX680 because my needs have changed.
Its gaming performance and energy efficiency are impressive. They did what they should have done and cut the crap, concentrate on rendering frames.
However, the use of the GPU has changed and as new game engines are developed those changes will become more evident. GPGPU functions are being interwoven into the engine to quickly do things like physics or make web-browsing faster. This was mainly brought forward by nVidia and companies are now using it. In this area AMD is winning.
 
[citation][nom]Chip in a Box[/nom]They both have strengths and weaknesses. The 680 is a better 1080p and below card and the 7970 is better at higher res. It looks like the 7970 is a little bit better with overclocking, and having more memory means it will be a bit more future proof too. It's also a compute card and thats why the power drain isnt quite as good.They are both overpriced for 1080p cards I think. If I was going to buy one I'd buy the 7970 - it's only $50 more and I think the card will have more staying power because of RAM, bandwidth and crossfire. The 680 is a really good card! Nvidia is back for sure but I still think the smart choice is the 7970 - hopefully AMD will lower prices to at least the same price and we can get a price war.[/citation]

well.. at least we now know, the extra power wasted because that compute thing, same as fermi did. if you are only gaming, not into compute programming, i say 680 is still a better buy. its compute ability still adequate for compute in gaming (physx, cuda/directcompute effects), for example the compute difference in civ5 isnt that large as in lux benc. infact it still win in compute consumer application like mediaespresso which is the real product, not theoritical metrics. i guess their compute focus are for consumer applications. so 680 now has more balance in graphics and compute, and clear advantages in 1920 res, which is mainstream. besides, if you want more eye candy, you have to lower to 1920 res in the end.
 
Am I the only Nvidia owner that feels ....eh . I was looking for something that would eclipse the GTX 590 and the AMD 6990 in a single card. I guess the claims of 3X faster that a GTX 580 were just claims.
 
too bad the dynamic overclocking features cannot be turned off to allow manual overclocking... if the card has an 8pin plus 6 pin power connector and beefy power phase... it can reach higher overclock... that is the job that nvidia pass up to their AIB partner...
 
I was never a NVIDIA Fan until now. They were(in the past) always too expensive, and too hot. The 680 Is such a leap forward for them. I'm proud of them for pricing it accordingly and even BEATING AMD. Good job NVIDIA, you have a new fan.
 
why is Tom's using Crysis 2 instead Crysis 1 for part of its benchmarks. I thought Crysis 1 was more demanding than the 2nd even with the DX11 add on.
 
[citation][nom]tinmann[/nom]Am I the only Nvidia owner that feels ....eh . I was looking for something that would eclipse the GTX 590 and the AMD 6990 in a single card. I guess the claims of 3X faster that a GTX 580 were just claims.[/citation]

The Samaritan used on the Kepler card had lighter AA (FXAA compared to MSAA on the three 580s) and three graphics cards have poor scaling (going above two always does, but GTX 580s are already known to have worse scaling than VLIW4 and GCN Crossfire). At best, it only showed that Epic didn't want to show the 680's AA weakness (compared to GCN and Fermi cards. It is still pretty good) and also neglected to mention that three 580s probably scale around 60-75% of their maximum performance. Think about it and it makes obvious sense why one Kepler card (presumably the 680, this was not confirmed last I checked) ran the modified Samaritan where three 580s ran the previous version. The reason obviously isn't because Kepler is three times faster than Fermi. We also aren't told what the frame rates are for either setup so we don't know how close/identical they are.

Anyone claiming that Kepler is three times faster than Fermi didn't pay attention when they read the reports on the Samaritan demos. Also notice how those reports (at least the ones I read) didn't actually say that Kepler is three times faster anyway. That rumor was started by tech-ignorant readers.
 
wow a 580 gtx for 380 $ nice. Now lets be honest this is a very impressive card and sadly amd have come up short this time round. Their cards were absolute favouratis except in the 500$ segment for the past couple of years. With this generation of kepler cards coming I feel that the tide might be changing
 


As of right now AMD seems to fall short, but the 7900 cards' performance limits aren't even touched upon in this review outside of theoretic. Apparently, we can't go beyond 1125MHz on the shader cores because of driver problems or whatnot, but as Chris said, many 7970 owners found that the 7970 can easily reach 1300MHz. Judging by how well a 200MHz jump helped it in the next review, I daresay that the 7970 and GTX 680 could find themselves rough equals like the GTX 590 and Radeon 6990 (ironically, with similar performance to those two dual GPU cards too) do. The difference would then be the the 7970 has 50% more memory, a lot more memory bandwidth, a huge compute performance advantage, and probably has higher power usage.
 
I wonder if/when 7970 is finally optimized by driver support if it will make much of an improvement in test results.
 
@blazorthon Yeah its true that if overclocked the 7970 can outperform or equal the performance of the 680 but who is this who is gonna buy a more expensive card so that they can overclock it just to reach the performance levels of a cheaper card. the 680 is a very impressive card considering it was meant to replace the 560ti/570. If im not wrong the 7970 is the best that amd has to offer right now in terms of single card performance. We all know that Nvidia has its main 250w behemoth hiding somewhere waiting to be released.
 
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