NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Review: Retaking The Performance Crown
by Ryan Smith on March 22, 2012 9:00 AM ESTThe Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Prior to the launch of our new benchmark suite, we wanted to include The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which is easily the most popular RPG of 2011. However as any Skyrim player can tell you, Skyrim’s performance is CPU-bound to a ridiculous degree. With the release of the 1.4 patch and the high resolution texture pack this has finally been relieved to the point where GPUs once again matter, particularly when we’re working with high resolutions and less than high-end GPUs. As such, we're now including it in our test suite.
Skyrim presents us with an interesting scenario. At anything less than 2560 we’re CPU limited well before we’re GPU limited, and yet even though we’re CPU limited NVIDIA manages to take a clear lead while the 680 still finds room to push to the top. For whatever the reason NVIDIA would appear to have significantly less driver overhead here, or at the very least a CPU limited Skyrim interacts with NVIDIA’s drivers better than it does AMD’s.
In any case 2560 does move away from being CPU limited, but it’s not entirely clear whether the difference we’re seeing here is solely due to GPU performance, or if we’re still CPU limited in some fashion. Regardless of the reason the GTX 680 has a 10% lead on the 7970 here.
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falx - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
On the "Meet the GeForce GTX 680" page I think it should have said "This is as opposed to the vapor chamber on the GTX 580" not the 680. Had to reread it multiple times so now I'm not even sure. Can anyone verify my sanity?Ramon Zarat - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
The title "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Review: Retaking The Performance Crown" is misleading. Said like that, in means the 680 is the fastest card on the planet. It's not.The 590 and 6990 are trading blows at the top. Actually, because of that, there's currently no graphic card king, it's in fact a stalemate. A stalemate that is about to end with the imminent introduction of the AMD 7990.
To be honest to their readers, the title should have been "...Retaking The single GPU Performance Crown". NOTE TO THE AUTHOR: for the sake of logic and consistency, you better say the new 7990 is "Retaking The Performance Crown" without mentioning it's a dual GPU...
That "small" journalistic inaccuracy details aside, nice review, but limited. We have no idea how the new generation scale with SLI where AMD improved tremendously with the 7XXX series. We have no idea how it performs with 2, 3 or 4 monitors compared to AMD 7970 with its faster and bigger RAM buffer. We very few hints on how the 680 would perform with wide spread GPGPU apps product such has video transcoding, folding or even Physx!
For what we know this far, the 680 is clearly the best balanced price / performance / power ratio GPU ever produced by Nvidia, but comes a little short in some vertical department.
arjuna1 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Don't be surprised, this is Anandtech.N4g4rok - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Overall, i'm not real sure i understand the cutthroat nature of comments to these kind of things, let alone slightly overzealous writing.Just seems like a silly thing to get worked up about.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Some people are into it as a hobby and it obviously is very important look at the endless people it employs and you're at a website that thrives on people caring deeply about all of this.The gentleman had a good point, it's single core card king only.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
The GTX590 is clearly faster than the 6990, but we know who wants to claim it's a tie.The GTX580 is also clearly faster and by more, than the 6970. (CF vs SLI lowering the gap but never closing it in the dual core cards)
It's nice to see how big the lies have become in the fanboy space.
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I do agree with you that the 680 is only core single card king for now, but the GTX590 is clearly single card king, despite the endless lying to the contrary.
If you read the endless fudging on the initial articles, the writers even say " 590 beats the 6990 but not by a wide enough margin to convincingly "dethrone it".
It wins but it doesn't win, It's faster overall but it's not the king... fanboyism
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That's the kind of fan boy crud contradiction we get when science and truth is tossed aside for some sort of who knows what "reason" which is anything but reasoned.
piroroadkill - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Huh, sorry, but I'm not seeing it: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4239/nvidias-geforce...6990 vs 590, I'd say looking at the graphs, 6990 wins most of the time, but when 590 does win, it's usually convincingly.
Given that's pretty much a wash, I'd take the 6990 any day because of the increased VRAM. Believe me, you definitely need it when cranking up all the quality settings, ESPECIALLY if you're going to run multiple monitors.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
We've heard the last line for a long time speculatively even in reviews, but now the 680 has put that lie to rest in triple monitor wins.The other problem is once you've cranked settings enough for theoretical ram limiting, you're below playable frame rates.
So no, what you claim is just more fud because of those facts.
mindbomb - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
is it still vp5?i want some hardware vp8 decoding.
:3
RikkiTikkiTavi - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
This brings back competition to the graphics card market. After years of Nvidia selling their scorching-hot cards at hardly profitable prices, they can finally turn around and hunt AMD for a change. I can't wait to see their answer to this.(to prevent any cries from Nvidia-Fanboys about me being unfair to them: I own a 560Ti, after my 8800GT, 7600, 6800, 4200TI, and Riva TNT, so there)