Nvidia GeForce GTX 690 4 GB: Dual GK104, Announced

[Marcus52]

[citation][nom]fatality1515[/nom]@andrey64 "AMD good luck trying to beat this baby out with your 7990"It depends on your needs.. These days I use video card for 3D rendering.. 7990 will crush GTX 690 in compute performance, since the 680 had a such a pathetic performance in that area.[/citation]

As I always say, "application" is the first thing to look at when you build. You make a very good point.

However, I don't think what you said is quite accurate. In some compute tasks, the GTX 680 isn't all that far behind, or even matches the Radeon 7990, so your claim that it will "crush" the 690 in compute performance is a bit of an over-statement (assuming the 690 has anywhere near 200% the compute performance of the 680).

 

[mocchan]

Excited for the benches

 

[logox]

Well there goes the car I was GOING to get. LOL

 

[Guest]

and do what with this card? inhave 2 x 6970 and one is disabled because there are not games that use these amount of power!!! i am really intomcomputer stuff but any 200 euro video card will play at max 1080p settings every game that is a console port and 99% they are so why spend 1000$?

 

[fatality1515]

@Marcus52 Well according to this http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-680-review-benchmark,3161-15.html 7990 will crush 690.. The reason for that, is that nvidia needs to sell more quadro. It's all about greed..

 

[spookyman]

And the 7990 will still beat it with production.

Now the trick is if they will actually have the cards out for purchase. Tried buying a 590GTX last year but they were out.

They are still out of GTX 680's.

Guess I am going to have to settle for a 79xx series card now.

 

[ChiefTexas_82]

I want to see a GTX 660 announcement.

 

[ern88]

Ya, looks like AMD has the starngle hold on Nvidia with availibility of their line of 7xxx cards!!!

 

[warezme]

Good God, I paid $800 for my 590 and I thought that was over the top...sheesh.

 

[egilbe]

Good God, I paid $800 for my 590 and I thought that was over the top...sheesh.

It was, and is

 

[Pezcore27]

Looking forward to seeing some benchmarks on this as it should be very interesting.

Do I want one? - yes
Am I going to buy one? - no
Would I be sleeping on the couch if the wife found out I spent that much on a video card? - Probably

 

[SinisterSalad]

[citation][nom]Pezcore27[/nom]Would I be sleeping on the couch if the wife found out I spent that much on a video card? - Probably[/citation]
I'd be lucky to get the couch. Pretty sure I'd have to move out into the garage. :|

 

[Zephids]

Great Idea Nvidia. You don't have enough 28nm Chips in stock to sell GTX 680s, so you should release a card that take TWO 28nm Chips so you can sell even LESS GTX 690s. *thumbs up*

/endsarcasm

 

[robochump]

$1000 price tag would be a bad move if 680 in SLI is faster. $850-900 would be best.

 

[Wisecracker]

I guess this means nVidia is comfortable with current yields (not that yields are all that great) improving for some serious binning and harvesting. That's good for them, and probably good for AMD, too. Across-the-board yields for GCN should be quite good.

And the AMD tock to 32/28nm APUs should be smooth.

 

[slabbo]

7970's IMO are still the better card and now cheaper. AMD just underclocked their stock card. Nvidia just waited for AMD, then clocked it enough to beat AMD's card, and used that as their stock speeds. but when you check out other sites where they OC both cards, an OC'd 7970 beats out an OC'd 680.

since Nvidia came out first with their 690, AMD will just clock their 7990 just enough to beat out Nvidia's and use that as their stock speeds as well.

http://www.ddworld.cz/pc-a-komponenty/graficke-karty/test-gigabyte-windforce-gtx-680-oc-proti-radeon-hd-7970-oc-graficka-bitva-na-ostri-noze-6.html

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]pharoahhalfdead[/nom]Great point! When a company is more concerned about having the performance crown then the average Joe doesn't matter. If I didn't know they were gonna eventually release mainstream cards, I would say they took a page out of Apple's book. You know, "Over priced products for a small amount of clientele. Forget about those who can't afford the latest and greatest."[/citation]

Think about it. These Kepler cards really aren't that overpriced for their performance at all, so it's not fair to compare them to Apple. Most of us are screaming that it's overpriced, when it really isn't, it is just an extremely high end card. I have to say, I didn't think that we would see 690s or 7990s any time soon just because their performance would be ridiculous. This should be almost four times faster than the GTX 560 TI 2GB which is about one fourth the price and the 560 TI is often called one of the best values that Nvidia offers today. So, it's really not that overpriced. Maybe lowering the cost to around $875 to $900 would give it equal value (measured in average FPS per dollar in a wide variety of games) to the 560 TI 2GB.

Besides the obvious availability concern, I also have to wonder how badly a mere 2GB of VRAM per GPU will hurt these high end Kepler configurations with two or more GPUs. Going over 2560x1600, I'd expect 2GB to increasingly become a bad thing to have. Think about it. G104 in these cards has roughly double the performance of the Cayman in the 6970 and 6990, but Nvidia gave it the same amount of VRAM as AMD gave Cayman! That worries me. Nvidia has historically skimped on VRAM, but this is really stretching 2GB to it's limits. It should be fine on 2560x1600 or similar pixel counts, but the 690 is more for dual 2560x1600 or triple 1080p and similarly intensive resolutions and 2GB could become a severely limiting factor there. Can you guys imagine how much it would suck to have a card (or cards) like this, but need to lower settings to get incredible frame rates just because the VRAM can't keep up with the GPUs?

The VRAM bandwidth also worries me pretty badly. This is like doubling the GPU performance of an already memory bottlenecked card, without doubling the memory bandwidth. Games like Crysis 2 or Metro 2033 are already memory bandwidth bottlenecked by the 680 so much that the 7970 can beat the 680 in these games. Using some AA representative of this card's GPU performance and such could be fairly problematic as well. Seriously Nvidia, this kind of card either needs the VRAM interface upgraded to at least 384 bit for GDDR5 or to be left at 256 bit and upgraded to XDR2 or something similar in performance. 256 bit GDDR5 is no longer sufficient even if you up the clock frequency of the memory to 1500MHz.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]battletoad_boy[/nom]I guess Nvidia was too busy trying to sell everybody on their latest and greatest instead of fixing the massive stuttering issues of the 680. Doesn't matter if single card or SLI, these cards are busted right now for many people. Vsync also is really screwed up.Here's a month old 10 page thread at Nvidias offical forums (where nvidia has remained completely silent on the issue.) READ THIS BEFORE BUYING A 600 SERIES CARD. Dont just take toms word that the card is fine (how long did it take toms to admit microstuttering was a real thing?)http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php [...] 26227&st=0[/citation]

Nvidia was the first to respond to that thread and I think the problem is that the thread starter didn't know that with V-sync on, you need to make sure that FPS never drops below 60 because Vsync drops it to 30 automatically if the real FPS drops below 60. Adaptive Vsnyc should fix that problem, or changing game settings to ensure that the minimum frame rate is above 60FPS. This problem would exist with all graphics cards if the game settings and V-Sync are not configured properly and is entirely user error.

[citation][nom]matto17secs[/nom]Quote from the HardOCP preview: "We have had some hands on time with the new GeForce GTX 690 and we have to say it is perfect, inside and out." http://www.hardocp.com/article/201 [...] inside_out[/citation]

Why were you thumbed down for mentioning that [H]ocp has tested and reviewed a GTX 690?

[citation][nom]cangelini[/nom]Without direct access to the SIG's spec docs, I'm going off about an hour's worth of research elsewhere. Do you have any resources available indicating the slot does more than 75 W? Exceeding that number would break compatibility with first-gen interfaces, which seems unlikely.[/citation]

Some PCIe 2.x graphics cards have already broken PCIe 1.x compatibility in order to have 150w supplied by the 2.x slot instead of 75w, but I think that jaquith was only mentioning that a PCIe 3.0 slot itself is capable of more than 75w, not that the reference 690 will utilize the full wattage available from the slot.

 

[tuffjuff]

I think the fact they make these dual GPU cards is awesome, even if I'd never buy one (I do have two 560 448 cores in SLI, though). It reminds me of the Voodoo 5... R.I.P. 3DFX.

As a side note, this thing is freakin HUGE. I LOVE IT.

 

[tuffjuff]

[citation][nom]yobobjm[/nom]My 7970 is just fine, honestly for gaming, I don't really know why you would spend that much money but hey, who am I to judge, all I care about is all games a 60fps[/citation]

My guess is people running 3-6 screens. Only thing I can think of. My CPU is the bottleneck (2500k at 4.2Ghz) in my 560 448 core SLI config, this 690 is WAY faster than that...

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]fatality1515[/nom]@andrey64 "AMD good luck trying to beat this baby out with your 7990"It depends on your needs.. These days I use video card for 3D rendering.. 7990 will crush GTX 690 in compute performance, since the 680 had a such a pathetic performance in that area.[/citation]

The 7950 would crush the 690 in dual-precision compute performance, so the 7990 is a given in beating the 690 for compute. The 7900 cards also have the VRAM and VRAM bandwidth advantage, so 7900 will win in several games, especially when multiple GPUs and very high resolutions are concerned.

[citation][nom]Marcus52[/nom]Glad to know you can power 3 1920x1080 monitors on your "6970s". I'm kind of surprised you aren't GPU memory bound, but 2GB may be enough, I don't rightly know. 60fps minimum frame rates in BF3, World of Warcraft, and Crysis 2 must be really nice for less than, what, $700-800 and only 400-500W of graphics power. (Or do your 3 cards draw more than that?)/end sarcasm[/citation]

Three 6950 2GBs, even without being flashed to 6970s, are far better than a single 680 for gaming performance. You mention that you think that 2GB might be a problem for triple 1080p and that is a valid concern. However, it is no worse than having two 680s or a 690 with only 2GB per GPU. 2GB for triple 1080p should provide something of a bottleneck, but I don't think that it is a very bad one like 2GB for dual 2560x1600 or similar and higher pixel counts. Of course, 1GB is limiting for even 1080p in some games, so some games will be severely bottlenecked by only double an already limiting amount of RAM with triple the pixel count. It should depend on the game and quality settings.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]Marcus52[/nom]As I always say, "application" is the first thing to look at when you build. You make a very good point.However, I don't think what you said is quite accurate. In some compute tasks, the GTX 680 isn't all that far behind, or even matches the Radeon 7990, so your claim that it will "crush" the 690 in compute performance is a bit of an over-statement (assuming the 690 has anywhere near 200% the compute performance of the 680).[/citation]

The Kepler cards only come close to the GCN cards in single precision compute performance, not dual precision (which is far more important for professional/media work).

[citation][nom]gamerRO25[/nom]and do what with this card? inhave 2 x 6970 and one is disabled because there are not games that use these amount of power!!! i am really intomcomputer stuff but any 200 euro video card will play at max 1080p settings every game that is a console port and 99% they are so why spend 1000$?[/citation]

Get a good display configurations such as a 2560x1600 display or a 3D 1080p display and you will quickly find yourself wishing that you had more performance. Games today can fully load FAR better graphics setups than two 6970s. Thw whole point of more expensive graphics cards is to play above 1080p, not at 1080p. Also, if you get a seriously intense games such as Crysis 2 DX11 modded, then you can find yourself actually fully loading two 6970s at even 1080p and barely hitting even 50 to 60FPS.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]tuffjuff[/nom]My guess is people running 3-6 screens. Only thing I can think of. My CPU is the bottleneck (2500k at 4.2Ghz) in my 560 448 core SLI config, this 690 is WAY faster than that...[/citation]

A single 4K display could need at least a 690 or 7990 in many games and need even more (triple/quad SLI/CF) in some games with additional mods for even more graphics intensive picture quality. It's all about the pixel count, not the display count. For example, that single 4K display has more pixels than three 1080p displays have in total.

 

[bigdragon]

Nvidia really needs to open a game development shop. I don't see how the price, power consumption, or performance can be justified given today's lineup of console ports. We don't have enough PC-centric software. I certainly enjoy seeing the bar for graphics performance pushed forward, but I want to see software to make use of that hardware as well. The software is really lacking.

 

[quangluu96]

1000$ o..o i can just get a quad GTX 590 :/