NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Review: Ultra Expensive, Ultra Rare, Ultra Fast
by Ryan Smith on May 3, 2012 9:00 AM ESTCivilization V
Our final game, Civilization 5, gives us an interesting look at things that other RTSes cannot match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry, driver command lists for reducing CPU overhead, and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
As with Total War: Shogun 2 we’re reaching the point where we’re CPU limited. Even at 2560 we’re clearly capping out at around 95fps, and at 1920 our results just get outright weird to the point where we may be seeing the first and only evidence of the overhead from NVIDIA’s move to static scheduling on Kepler.
In any case, even though we’re approaching a CPU bottleneck the GTX 690 still does well enough for itself here versus both AMD and NVIDIA. We’re looking at a 5% lead at 2560 over the 7970CF, while performance reaches 99% of the GTX 680 SLI.
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tviceman - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
Last page: Based on our benchmarks we’re looking at 95% of the performance of the GTX "580 SLI" - 580 SLI should read 680 SLI.UltraTech79 - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
I wish there was a separate button to point out this sort of thing so they could silently correct it. Dont get me wrong, I think its good to have accurate information, just clutters things up a bit.Ryan Smith - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
My inbox is always open.=)mediaconvert - Friday, May 4, 2012 - link
p 2While the basic design of the GTX 690 resembles the GTX 590, NVIDIA has replaced virtually every bit "with plastic with metal" for aesthetic/perceptual purposes.
surely "with plastic with metal" to "of plastic with metal"
still a good review
rockqc - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
1st line on page 2 "Much like the GTX 680 launch and the GTX 590 before it, the first generation the first generation of GTX 690 cards are reference boards being built by NVIDIA"First generation has been written twice.
Torrijos - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
The first benchmark plotted (Crysis) has a resolution of 5760 x 1200, this has to be wrong!tipoo - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
It's crazy but right. He tested that resolution on multiple games.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
If you look at accumulated benchmarks across the web, the 680 Nvidia cards beat the 7970 amd cards by a much higher percentage in 1920x1080 (17.61% ahead) than they do in 1920x1200 (10.14% ahead).This means anand reviews always tests in 1920x1200 to give the amd cards a prettier looking review, instead of testing in 1920x1080 (the most commonly available resolution at 1920x that they could easily set their 1920x1200 monitors to).
Hence their tests here at anand are likely also amd favorably biased in higher resolutions.
http://translate.google.pl/translate?hl=pl&sl=...
A5 - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
It's not like 19x12 is an uncommon or unavailable resolution. Maybe Nvidia should improve their 19x12 performance?crimson117 - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
Sadly, it is a very uncommon resolution for new monitors. Almost every 22-24" monitor your buy today is 1080p instead of 1200p. :(