Behold the GTX 680!

[itachi73378]

A very in depth review by Digital Foundry can be found here

[BoyBettaKnow]

Read this yesterday, this may very well be my new card in a few months. The 580 had dropped in price as well now

[Nuvian]

I was not expecting it to be so silent & power efficient, the card seems to be dominating when it comes to 1900x1200(1080) res, i love the price point as well.

I just bought a 580GTX half a year ago, I'm tempted to this card now

[itachi73378]

Yeah I'm not even a PC gamer but I wonder if people who had just bought a 580 would be pissed.
Yesterday I saw a bunch of benchmarks as well. The 680 is currently the leading card in the market.

[BoyBettaKnow]

@Nuvian - Correct me if i'm wrong but you can use Nvida cards from a different series together can't you? It just uses one as a dedicated PhysX card or is that not ture?

It'd be one hell of an overpowered PhysX card though if you did do that

[Nuvian]

@Nuvian - Correct me if i'm wrong but you can use Nvida cards from a different series together can't you? It just uses one as a dedicated PhysX card or is that not ture?

It'd be one hell of an overpowered PhysX card though if you did do that

Hmm, haven't thought of that, not really sure, current gen cards take way to much space in the cabinet, cant be bothered cramming another one in there

Yeah I'm not even a PC gamer but I wonder if people who had just bought a 580 would be pissed.
Yesterday I saw a bunch of benchmarks as well. The 680 is currently the leading card in the market.

1920x1200 Apples-to-Apples Performance

The first thing we wanted to look at is to get a baseline for performance with just FXAA enabled, and no MSAA or Transparency AA enabled.

The graph below is run at 1920x1200 with FXAA and the highest in-game settings.


Right off the bat, without any burden of traditional MSAA, the GeForce GTX 680 is remarkably faster than the Radeon HD 7970 at 1920x1200. We are looking at a performance difference of 33% in favor of the GTX 680. In fact, even the GTX 580 is faster than the Radeon HD 7970. NVIDIA recently improved performance in this game in recent drivers, and it is certainly showing here.

Now we can look at what happens when we turn on MSAA+Transparency AA below.

In this graph we have 4X MSAA turned on in the game, and then we turned on 4X TR SSAA from the NVIDIA control panel and Adaptive SSAA from the AMD control panel. This is as close to the same Transparency Supersampling AA samples we can get to compare.

The GeForce GTX 680 just blows the Radeon HD 7970 away in Transparency AA performance. The GTX 680 is 94% faster than the Radeon HD 7970, and both are producing similar visual quality at these settings! This is amazing, and not what we expected.

Now let's turn on 8X MSAA + 8X TR SSAA and Adaptive SSAA.


In this graph we have 8X MSAA turned on in the game plus NVIDIA's 8X TR SSAA and AMD's Adaptive SSAA. This graph just blows our minds, something is severely bottlenecking the Radeon HD 7970 and we don't know what. The Radeon HD 7970 has 3GB of RAM and a very high memory bandwidth compared to the GTX 680. Yet, the GTX 680 is 208% faster!

Whatever the cause is, its clear the GTX 680 allows a better experience right now by allowing 8X MSAA + 8X TR SSAA to be enabled in this game and deliver above 60 FPS average performance with phenomenal image quality.

Taken from the HARDOCP review.

[itachi73378]

Epic showed the samaritan running on a single, presumably gtx 680. So next gen can certainly look like samaritan.
http://www.psu.com/forums/showthread...pler%C2%92-GPU

[keefy]

Another review.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...mark,3161.html

They cost around £400-£450 in Great Britain.

[jlippone]

Yup looks like a nice card indeed.
Nvidia should be releasing the Big kepler GPU within this year as well. (rumors say it would be 50% faster than 680..)

I'm getting the 680 and use it until Maxwell finally hits the markets in around early 2014. (the proper nextgen architecture.)

here's a nice list of GTX680 reviews.
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=61693

[HellsJester]

Im trying to decide if i should wait for Maxwell or just wait for the 680 to be cheaper.

[keefy]

Is maxwell a codename for a newer GPU?

[HellsJester]

Is maxwell a codename for a newer GPU?

The next line.
580 was Fermi
680 is Kepler
Maxwell will most likely be 780 lol

[gangsta_795]

Now we're 2 weeks away from the 7990

[jlippone]

The next line.
480 was Fermi
680 is Kepler
Maxwell will most likely be 780 lol

Fixed it for you..

580 was nothing more than slightly fixed Fermi..
Never understood why they named them 5xx series as it was nothing new.

Currently it seems to take ~3years for nvidia to get totally new architecture out in open, also it is known that the design for the next architecture following Maxwell has begun.. (not the maxwell upgrade.. but the one after that.)

[Morganator]

I've been waiting a long time for Nvidia to get its act together. Kepler may just have done it. I'm intrigued and anxious to see how Civilizations 5 and possibly 6 will hold up as well as Sim City 5 which is due out next year. Right now, Civ5 kinda chokes in the latter stages of the game and Cities XL 2011 simply crawls after my city reaches a certain point.

[John25]

I've been waiting a long time for Nvidia to get its act together. Kepler may just have done it. I'm intrigued and anxious to see how Civilizations 5 and possibly 6 will hold up as well as Sim City 5 which is due out next year. Right now, Civ5 kinda chokes in the latter stages of the game and Cities XL 2011 simply crawls after my city reaches a certain point.

won't those types of games be more CPU intensive than GPU as I play Civ 5 and don't have any issues on my GPU so far ??

[itachi73378]

I've been waiting a long time for Nvidia to get its act together. Kepler may just have done it. I'm intrigued and anxious to see how Civilizations 5 and possibly 6 will hold up as well as Sim City 5 which is due out next year. Right now, Civ5 kinda chokes in the latter stages of the game and Cities XL 2011 simply crawls after my city reaches a certain point.

I'm in my first civ 5 game. In the modern era (like 250 turns) and my i7 laptop takes like 3-5 seconds to load after every turn. Gets a little annoying

[Sufi]

But they already came out with the best card already, the GT 9900.

The only thing you can do is come out with the GT 10,000 after that.

[Bligmerk]

The GTX 680 hitting retail means Kepler is finalized except for the eventual optimizations, and Maxwell work has started or is well along already for introduction in late 2013. It is looking more and more that the PS4 will have some Maxwell level GPU and the Nvidia roadmap shows Maxwell to be 6 times more powerful and faster than Fermi while pulling a lot less power. The tech demos are approaching the startling level of detail and motion.

[Morganator]

won't those types of games be more CPU intensive than GPU as I play Civ 5 and don't have any issues on my GPU so far ??

To an extent. I do like my graphics settings set to maximum though. I think, there is plenty of optimization both on the CPU and GPU side of things. Then again, I do expect a little slowdown when I have more than 1,000,000 soldier count and over 80 cities.

I'm in my first civ 5 game. In the modern era (like 250 turns) and my i7 laptop takes like 3-5 seconds to load after every turn. Gets a little annoying

Exactly. It shouldn't take so long. I understand that other Civs make turns too and they have things to do but it's that final part of the turn that's annoying.

[John25]

lol thats a hell of a lot especially 80 Cities damn that must take forever to maintain, iv'e only played it a Couple of Times so far.

[ryanevans1]

Lol 680 looks totally badass, price is abit high too

[Grim-FunDango]

Got to love DigitalFoundry's obsession ! Thanks for the link OP, I always forget to check their site on a regular basis.

[Rapture]

The 680 is an extremely sexy card, but I think I'll wait for the 700 series before upgrading anything.

I'm in my first civ 5 game. In the modern era (like 250 turns) and my i7 laptop takes like 3-5 seconds to load after every turn. Gets a little annoying

All the more reason for you to wipe them out!

[Morganator]

lol thats a hell of a lot especially 80 Cities damn that must take forever to maintain, iv'e only played it a Couple of Times so far.

My biggest Civ game so far has been with the American civilization. 128 cities, 2,500,000+ soldiers, 780,000,000+ population, 12,000+ gold per turn, 10,000+ tons of agriculture, 10,000+ tons of manufactured goods, 14,000+ science, 20,000+ culture. My treasury had reached 4,300,000,000,000 gold reserves. I was playing the Earth map on huge. My territory consisted of North, Central and South America and all their outlying islands, Australian continent, all the south pacific islands and where the Japanese mainland and islands were. Plus, I had taken Greenland and Iceland.