NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Video Card Review

[Apoptosis]

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Video Card Review

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 graphics card was designed for gamers who want to enjoy their games at the maximum graphics settings and screen resolutions, with high levels of AA enabled. To accomplish this, the GeForce GTX 680 ships with 1536 CUDA Cores that have base clock speed of 1006MHz and typical Boost clock speed is 1058MHz. The GeForce GTX 680 also comes with 2GB of GDDR5 memory that are clocked at 6008MHz! Read on to see if this is enough to beat the AMD Radeon HD 7970!

In the seven game titles that we tested today, we found the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 to be 14.34% faster than the stock AMD Radeon HD 7970 reference card when we compared all of the tests results at a resolution of 1920x1080. Factor in that the GeForce GTX 680 costs $50 or 9% less and you got yourself some pretty good reasons to go with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 over an AMD Radeon HD 7900 series card.

Article Title: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Video Card Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1881/1/
MSRP: $499

[Major_A]

Seems like should have at least gone with a 384 bit memory controller. It's a nice card but seems like a crippled card that could've been better.

[Apoptosis]

Seems like should have at least gone with a 384 bit memory controller. It's a nice card but seems like a crippled card that could've been better.

Likely, but it's still ~14% faster across the board than a Radeon HD 7970 reference card with the 256-bit controller design with the super fast 6GHz+ memory chips.

[jnanster]

Thank you for the great review!
Well I wouldn't call it crippled, but the memory controller IMO is an issue.
Nice cool card.
What most impressed me was the video/TXAA/and the new more destructible Physx.
Combined, these make for more playable and realistic gaming, boom factor.
Jnanster

[Major_A]

Seems like should have at least gone with a 384 bit memory controller. It's a nice card but seems like a crippled card that could've been better.

Likely, but it's still ~14% faster across the board than a Radeon HD 7970 reference card with the 256-bit controller design with the super fast 6GHz+ memory chips.

I have a feeling they probably did it on purpose so down the road they can "tweak" the card and sell it as a new SKU. After playing around internally with the card against an HD 7970 they probably came to just that conclusion.

[Apoptosis]

Well all know that NVIDIA does an amazing job with products and marketing, so I think you are on the right path. GK110 in August/September will be interesting to say the least.

[Sttm]

The 680 looks like a real winner, but I have a suspicion they were developing this to be the mid range 560ti replacement but then hit such high performance they decided to make it the the 580 replacement instead. As you'd think the GK110 would be the 580 successor and not the 104. Which makes me wonder if in the fall they release GK110 as a 695? Or do they make it a 700 series product. But with the die size increase and the memory controller improvements, it should be about as big of a difference as the 580 is over the 560ti now. Which is quite large.

Either way its dam good news. Performance/Price finally getting the proper increase with the 28nm generation.

[CoachAub]

Great news and thanks for sharing this through a very thorough review!!! I'm glad to see competition heating up again, but the way NVidia was bragging they would crush AMD's 7970....I expected a bigger jump in benchmarks. It's still impressive, don't get me wrong. Some folks will say it does dominate AMD's cards it, but almost no one said the 7970 crushed or dominated the 580. It was just merely better as I think we see here. We're seeing the next step-up in level of performance for sure. Now, we'll see if AMD can come up with their next device (besides the usual dual-chip monsters that come out for each flagship card from both sides).

[Ramon Zarat]

"NVidia was bragging they would crush AMD's 7970....I expected a bigger jump in benchmarks"

It only took Nvidia its mainstream GPU (GK104) to exceed the top of the line ATI 7970 on all front: price, power and performance. From that perspective, it *IS* an epic crush. Just imagine what the real monster, the GK110, will do. For all intent and suppose, the GK104 is a neutered version of the GK110. I suspect that one will have a 384bit bus, coupled with GDDR5 6GHZ+, much better GPGPU performance, especially in the FP64 department and of course, much more overall raw power. Time will tell. I still hate Nvidia as a corporation, but I would be a fool not to recognized what they have just accomplished.