NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Review: Retaking The Performance Crown
by Ryan Smith on March 22, 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.
Remember when NVIDIA used to sweep AMD in Civ V? Times have certainly changed in the last year, that’s for sure. It only seems appropriate that we’re ending on what’s largely a tie. At 2560 the GTX 680 does have a 4% lead over the 7970, however the 7970 reclaims it’s lead at the last possible moment at 1920. At this point we’ve seen the full spectrum of results, from the GTX 680 losing badly to winning handily, and everything in between.
On a final note, it’s interesting to see that the GTX 680 really only manages to improve on the GTX 580’s performance at 2560. At 1920 the lead is only 8%, and at 1680 we’re just CPU limited. Haswell can’t get here soon enough.
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Wreckage - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Impressive. This cards beats AMD on EVERY level! Price, performance, features, power..... every level. AMD paid the price for gouging it's customers, they are going to lose a ton of marketshare. I doubt they have anything to match this for at least a year.Creig - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
The review has been up for less than a minute so you couldn't possibly have read it already. How pathetic is it that you were sitting there hitting F5 repeatedly just so you could get in another "First post! Nvidia is uber!" comment.Get a life.
Grooveriding - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Haha Creig,Good observation, he must of been sitting there spamming to get in that first comment, before he read a word of the review.
Sour grapes at being banned much, Wreckage ?
nathanddrews - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
... but he's correct. The 680 does dominate in nearly every situation and category."the GTX 680 is faster, cooler, and quieter than the Radeon HD 7970. NVIDIA has landed the technical trifecta, and to top it off they’ve priced it comfortably below the competition."
Obvioulsy Wreckage's analysis of AMD's "price gouging" and prophesies of doom are farfetched...
N4g4rok - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Well, yeah, the card does well in most of those tests, but i think it might be a little too far to say that it dominates the 7970 on every level.cactusdog - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Just finsished looking around various sites and the 680 isnt as good as was suggested.Dont forget, you're basically comparing an overclocked Nvidia card to a stock AMD card, and even the base clock is much higher on the nvidia card.
At the same clocks the results will look much better for AMD. Also, 3 monitor gaming could favour AMD with 3GB of vram.
Seems like Nvidia really wanted to target the 7970 and the price/performance tag this time, by building a souped up, overclocked Gk104 but its not a 7970 killer. AMD will just need to sell them for $449.
AMD can stay with the 7970 as planned until Q4 and the 8 series.
gamerk2 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
You know clocks aren't the only thing that determines speed? Couldn't one just as easily argue that AMD cards were better because they basically clocked their RAM so high?Fact is, at stock, the card beats the 7970 at a lower price. Period.
Meaker10 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
You're ignoring the host of factory overclocked models out there that will be quieter than the 680M and perform on a similar level, the price just needs to be dropped.Kakkoii - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Herp derp, the same can be said about Nvidia cards as well. The 680 has tonnes of OC'ing headroom. The GPU boost it has is a messily overclock.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
I guess the lower clocked cores of 470, 480, 570, 580 , and many other Nvidia cards were greatly cheated in all benchmarks because the amd cores were often well over 100mhz higher at stock....So we have had at least 3 years of lying benchmarks in amd's favor.
I'd like to personally thank gamerk2 for this very astute observation that sheds the light of Nvidia asbolutely winning in all the above mentioned nvidia cars for the past couple of years.
Thank you... (sarc/reality check is free)