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

[silverblue]

[citation][nom]ubercake[/nom]Yeah... There's no price argument any longer. Who wants to admit to buying inferior products for a higher cost? This is a whole new way of thinking for the AMD fanboy. I guess you just suck it up and move on.[/citation]
AMD only priced it there because they had the fastest card. Much like NVIDIA pricing the 580 where it was, I seem to recall.

Same old accusations of fanboyism from fanboys themselves.

 

[horaciopz]

GTX 660! please be this kind of awesomeness !

 

[cathode]

Not that impress, given the little difference over amd. The good news is that amd will lower the price for their 7970-7950 something nvidia wont be able to do so sense it's a new card. AMD will still make a better deal unless nvidia can lower it's price.

 

[hannibal]

Not that impress, given the little difference over amd. The good news is that amd will lower the price for their 7970-7950 something nvidia wont be able to do so sense it's a new card. AMD will still make a better deal unless nvidia can lower it's price.

The 7970 is bigger than 680, so it is not so easy to reduce the price! The 7800 series more suitable fighting the 680. It is allmost as fast as 6950 and it is based an smaller chip and it is more gamer card than compute cards like 580 was and 7900 series is.
If AMD wants to take crown back it is better make faster version based on 7800 series...
But as I said before, there are good cards in the market at this moment! Allso they are good at different areas.

 

[Chip in a box]

Quite weak that it just beats the 7970 which is more of a compute card anyway. The 660 won't be fast enough to beat the 7870 and that's where the real money will be made.

 

[bison88]

[citation][nom]EXT64[/nom]Really disappointing DP compute, but a tradeoff had to be made and this card is meant for gaming, so I can understand their position. Hopefully GK110 is a real card and will eventually come out.[/citation]


It's actually not really a trade off though per se. It's intentionally limited as the review states to separate the Workstation/Desktop from the Professional cards. Fermi is capable of much higher numbers than the GTX580 shows on there, but the consumer versions are intentionally limited to force business to buy their pro cards, which Nvidia does have a huge strangle hold on.

 

[Lord Captivus]

Finally the biggest question of all is answered!!
Can it run Crysis?
YES IT CAN!

 

[ltdementhial]

So i will buy something between the HD 7870-GTX 660ti nice if the prices go down this month i live in mexico but i got a neighboard in austin...so TD will be xD...that or microcenter...

 

[Johnpombrio]

The NVidia GTX680 is NOT the top end single GPU from NVidia. That honor will go to the NVidia GTX685 to be released sometime soon (NVidia is finally getting better yields on the Kepler 28 nm chips). The GTX685 will be a lot more powerful than the GTX680. Rumor has an April release date, but just a rumor.

The GTX680 is based on the GK104 family of chipsets. The high end Kepler is the GK685 and will have the GK100 ( 100 better than 104, don't ask me...) chipset. There is a substantial bump in CUDA cores (50%) and 3DMark11 performance goes from X3000 to X4500. The benchmarks for the GTX680 does indeed show a 3DMark11 score of 3,165. If that holds true, then the GTX685 might well reach 4,500+ (compared to AMD 7970's score of 2,670). That is a hel'of'a bump in performance!
Now for the bad news. The rumored retail value of the GTX685 will be around $700. Still, for the extra performance per dollar, it might be a good deal.

 

[noidis]

Glad to see it's what was expected. Not sure why there are still 79xx owners crying that their cards are better. Be glad you had top of the line for a while. Rationalize that you paid a premium for that luxury... Now accept that Nvidia has thrown a curve ball and prices will sink.

I only hope AMD surpasses the 680 in their next release to drop prices further. Nothing says win for a consumer like competition.

 

[billybobser]

Long term, I'd prefer to have an AMD when prices drop into the sane region.

Though if this card (finally) drops into 560ti territory when the real flagship appears, this will certainly be a candidate, leaving AMD nowhere.

Fair play though, the two makers have outdone themselves and are certainly cashing in on their work, maturity of these cards should send prices crashing, though I just worry as they've run out of numbers to call them.

 

[Guest]

I really miss something in the review, which I hope will be addressed in a future article: PhysX performance. So, the 680 is great at gaming but not so good at computing... Well, PhysX is used for gaming but it is a computing technology. So, how do PhysX-intensive games perform when using just a 680? Benchmarking Mafia 2 with APEX set to high would be great.

 

[aoneone]

So in conclusion, gtx 590 still dominates therefore, do not waste your time and money on gtx 680. If anything, wait until May for the gtx 690 and then we can re-consider. ^_^

 

[cmi86]

The new 680 is most often getting beaten by AMD's last gen high end stuff. Just image how it will fair against the likes of a 7990 when it becomes available (you know it's not far off). A big step in the right direction for nvidia but I have a feeling this crown will not be thiers for long...

 

[alexdh01]

Thanks for paying attention to the feed back on the 7800 series! 1920x1080 on Ultra.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]alexdh01[/nom]Thanks for paying attention to the feed back on the 7800 series! 1920x1080 on Ultra.[/citation]
I read all comments ;-) Keep the feedback coming!

 

[Guest]

The biased thing is that in the article test never is mentioned that the auto-overclock of the 680 is always on, so you end up comparing an overclocked card with non overclocked cards. An overclocked 7970 will end up getting almost the same performance than the 680.

 

[CaedenV]

[citation][nom]BigMack70[/nom]Noise, temperature, and (to a lesser extent) power draw are going to be variable as well (especially due to the dynamic overclocking on the 680), yet they are compared.Your argument makes no sense. You can only gain data and nuance by comparing overclocked results. You don't have to compare 100 samples of overclocking to give relevant overclocking advice to the end user - all overclocking just needs to be qualified by "individual results may vary", and you're good to go.Fact is: OC vs OC these cards trade blows, stock vs stock the 680 is consistently faster. Tom's review would never let the end user know this, therefore it fails.It's similar (though far less egregious) to something like a GTX 480 review that ignores power/temperature/noise data.[/citation]
Hi, you must be new here. Toms hardware is a site where they do articles every day, and to fill out more days they ALWAYS break analysis down to focus on different aspects of computer hardware. With EVERY new release (be it CPU, GPU, cases, mobos, etc) there is always an initial first look where everything is just about the basic card, and is then followed up with other articles that then focus on other aspects. In the Case of GPUs there is generally an introduction article, an OC article, with the possibility of others down the road as newer drives are released, changes in the game lineup, or to focus on other things like production work, or a particular technology like CUDA. This was the first article, and now that both teams have their guns out we will begin to see the fun stuff like comparing OCs and other stuff soon. Just be patient.

 

[Ohmybad]

can't wait for the AMD/Nvida forum trolls explode over 680 and 7970

 

[qiplayer]

AMD must stop taking away warranty if user open the card. It actualy happen in europe.

It would have been nice compare with overclocked 7970

And by last, it's a pity see the classification based on the dx11 and not the dx9 scores (!!!!!!!!!), seem for the testing by high/ultra settings

If one has more than 90fps he augments the graphic level. So there is no useful classification above 90/100 fps with lover graphic settings.


Then ... I always wonder how these results are compared to actual cards scores? maybe 2x6950, 2x6870(mine), gtx 460, gtx 560, gtx 570 and so on. Just to make a comparison with the cards that we are actually usying.

I have a new eyefinity setting, and don't know how I can use these results regarding the fact that I have 3 hd screens. Should I divide time 3 the fps of the 1920x1080 results? I hope not
Finally I might get 2 7970 or 2 gtx680, but it's better to wait until 7990 and gtx690 come out.

With eyefinity I play crysis2 with low setting, dx9, and lower res (2400x600), when without eyefinity I was playing crysis2 almost on everything on ultra with dx11. But I see the bottleneck of these 1 gb cards in this case is the memory.

anyway
good results this gtx680

I really wonder also to see a video, just to see what happens if the graphic demand grows quickly. There are a lot of things that numbers don't tell but eyes can see. It's enough not having enough fps output for 0.2 seconds to get killed online.
And this is not seen by average fps, it would be like microstuttering by amd crossfire cards, where you get 70 fps, then in the middle of the action you loose a bunch of fotograms and get killed.

I don't know how much to trust this adaptive system. I wait for user feedbacks. Because when playing with the card one can tell the difference.

Greetings from the middle of europe

 

[qiplayer]

Hi, you must be new here. Toms hardware is a site where they do articles every day, and to fill out more days they ALWAYS break analysis down to focus on different aspects of computer hardware. With EVERY new release (be it CPU, GPU, cases, mobos, etc) there is always an initial first look where everything is just about the basic card, and is then followed up with other articles that then focus on other aspects. In the Case of GPUs there is generally an introduction article, an OC article, with the possibility of others down the road as newer drives are released, changes in the game lineup, or to focus on other things like production work, or a particular technology like CUDA. This was the first article, and now that both teams have their guns out we will begin to see the fun stuff like comparing OCs and other stuff soon. Just be patient.

I think he is wright. Because the 7970 is specially known for having a very good overclocking range compared to other cards. So if you'd have one 7970 you'd overclock it. Same with gtx680, but this last doesn't go faster when overclocked.

So this review doesn't keep in mind the best points of the biggest competitor

Anyway I think it is a good review.
Thanks to the editor

 

[Guest]

The Performance/Watt numbers are wrong. Granted, I only got a slightly different number for the AMD cards (likely due to rounding of the numbers), but the GTX 680's number is completely off. I got 145.6%, which is still very commendable. The only way to get up to the 170%'s is if it averaged the same power as the 7950.

Also, as far as meeting the 2x performance/watt compared to Fermi, it is probably achieved if you were to restrict the power you looked at strictly to the card itself. Your analysis in the conclusion doesn't take that into account. The rest of the system is reducing the efficiency percentages of the card by itself. That is most likely where Nvidia's 2x came from. Although, as a consumer I am really more interested in the overall impact on the system.

Good review, as always.

 

[Novuake]

Ok I more prone to an AMD card myself BUT DAMN lets keep in mind here these are preview drivers. If we keep in mind what Nvidia did with Skyrim a while back, a 15-20% performance jump even on their ancient 8xxx/9xxx series.

GK104 could be one for the history book.

Beating AMD mostly in gaming and still on preview drivers. You could say this of AMD too but we all know the infamous driver support AMD has. They will have to drop HD7xxx prices across the mid to high range board.

A big shame we cant turn of GPU Turbo though... Compute performance is to be expected from GK110... If not Nvidia screwed themselves abit.

 

[witcherx]

not a good card for the compute guys

 

[Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer]

[citation][nom]scotty99[/nom]Its a midrange card, anyone who disagrees is plain wrong. Thats not to say its a bad card, what happened here is nvidia is so far ahead of AMD in tech that the mid range card purposed to fill the 560ti in the lineup actually competed with AMD's flagship. If you dont believe me that is fine, you will see in a couple months when the actual flagship comes out, the ones with the 384 bit interface.[/citation]
I don't know why you got downvoted; I believe you are absolutely correct. On a completely related note, I'm really irked by the FP64 performance. My 570 is faster at 64-bit floating point operations than this card is. 1/24th FP32 speeds? Good job driving a wedge in between "professional" and "consumer products.

Here's my guess. The "real flagship" will have a lot more FP64 cores both overall and in relation to the number of FP32 cores. I wouldn't be surprised to see a Tesla chip with only FP64 cores...priced "appropriately"...