NVIDIA GTX 680 2GB Review Comment Thread

[beck2448]

Sometime this year Nvidia will release it's monster GPU which will be their ultimate single GPU solution. If its another 20-30% faster than the 680 I'm in.

[Bond007]

Originally Posted by Mena

Hmmm....not very impressive I must say. Sure it is a little faster but honestly I expected more. I see a 690 in the near future.....

I would agree if they kept power consumption the same, but they did not. They got the performance improvement and a noticeable decrease in power consumption at the same time.

[LionRed]

Very exciting...but I reckon I will be waiting until one card out performs tri SLI'd 480''s.

Seems to be saving me having or wanting to upgrade to date. Not to mention no new game has come out that interests me that might require more video card performance. I am sure I will upgrade video cards someday...just not this year.

[terrybear]

Great review as always sky.

That being said, the ONLY thing that impresses me is the lower heat/power consumption which is 1 of the knocks i've always pointed out about nvidia. ONLY the nvidia loyalists/fanboy's will read all the reviews & say as some of those reviews "that it dominates radeon 7970", BUT in alot of those reviews 1080i/p gaming the 680 gets some scores in .. but bump that up to 2560x1200 & 3 screen resolutions & the cards are on a practicaly equal footing. I also dont call a 12% on average preformance above 7970 in some instances "dominating" & again, where also not looking at at the oc'ed editions either.

Ultimately in the end, the ONLY winners here today are US the consumer looking to get the best price/preformance in our price range & that is what this card does is puts the overinflated AMD cards pricing in check. Also, as 1 reviewer/person sugested maybe this also starts pushing things to the point again that there will be no advantage if running a radeon or geforce card.

[draemn]

So you pretty sure the 680 will not be the flagship single GPU in the near future? Those EVGA cards should be selling super fast thanks to their step up program...

[GT7R]

Originally Posted by great_big_abyss

And AMD improved over their last generation by 41%. So what's your point?

His point (with which I agree) is that the 580 was the king of the hill for some good 15 months (the dual GPUs are a different mater), then finally the 7970 stole it's crown... just to be beaten in every way a month or so later.
AMD has improved 41% over an OK-ish product (architecture & performance wise) the 6970, whine NV improved 36% over a class leading card, the 580 (again, from architectural point of view).

[lKashl]

Originally Posted by draemn

So you pretty sure the 680 will not be the flagship single GPU in the near future? Those EVGA cards should be selling super fast thanks to their step up program...

Rumours about the 685 seem to be pretty solid, theres no guarantees but you never know, especially considering the 680 is priced no where near traditional price premiums for NV's highest end card.

Anyway hats off to NVIDIA for finally getting something competitive out in terms of performance/price not to mention power consumption. The 680 is shaping up to kill the 7970 at lower resolutions although ATI are still preferable for multi-gpu and monitor users IMO.

What should really be interesting though is how the rumoured 685 with its late launch date will fare against ATI's next gen product launch. Given the purported stats it might just be sufficient to create inter-generation competition and secure NV the next generation, but that's all just speculation at this stage.

Shame NV and ATI are pushing out hardware advancements at such a tremendous rate while MS and Sony are sitting around on the next gen consoles leaving us with nothing but shoddy ports and a few treasured exclusives :(

[IRQ Conflict]

No tessellation benches? Or did I miss it?

[chrisk]

Great review as always. Had to wait until just now to read more than the conclusion.

For those looking for folding numbers, this will be very interesting. Conpute functions are drastically changed, and there is a conpute bench out there (Luxmark) that is actually not very promising on that front. Actually, the 580 beat the 680. Hopefully its just a case of the drivers not being optimized for the benchmark used, and it is an OpenCL bench so there is hope. But when asked about it, nVidia seems to have said an update is coming, but they also said Kepler was not focusing on folding, but Physix instead.....

Will wait for folding numbers on this one big time.

[SKYMTL]

Originally Posted by IRQ Conflict

No tessellation benches? Or did I miss it?

Why should we include that? Synthetic benches do nothing to indicate in game performance.