GeForce GTX 680 Review: Nvidia’s Impressive, Efficient New Graphics Card - stewartzies1964

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

• Fantastic Performance
• Muscularity Efficient and quiet

Our Finding of fact

If you're the sort of enthusiast gamer who will spend $500 on a graphics posting, this is the unrivaled to buy.

Only members of a belittled class of PC enthusiasts will spend $500 on a artwork card. You have to have pretty stringent requirements–perhaps a large high-res monitor or two or a sample for extreme image quality–to make use of that sort of performance. Most recent games run advisable enough on a graphics card costing half Eastern Samoa a great deal. Merely if you're not contented with "advisable enough," the GeForce GTX 680 English hawthorn be for you. Among expensive graphics cards, it takes the crown for delivering the best performance, with excellent features and real impressive energy efficiency.

The GeForce GTX 680 is Nvidia's first card to incorporate a new nontextual matter chip architecture, code-named Kepler. IT's connatural to the Femtometre architecture found in the GeForce GTX 580 and the GTX 480 before it. Nvidia has understood the fundamental principles of the Fermi architecture and reworked it for greater efficiency, improving performance per watt and performance per square millimeter. The Fermi chips are also factory-made along a littler 28-nanometer process, whereas the GTX 580 was made on a 40nm process. The 28nm appendage substance lower power draw, high clock speeds, and more-densely-packed transistors. In fact, Johannes Kepler is well smaller than Fermi at less than 300mm² (full-size up Enrico Fermi chips are 520mm²).

The new GPU reduces the amount of curb logic in to each one cluster of stream processors, sacrificing some potential carrying into action in GPU-based general computation for better performance in 3D graphics applications. The sequent chip has three times as many watercourse processors of Fermi, twice as more texture units, and a clock stop number of just over 1GHz. There are fewer render back-ends and a narrower memory bus, but those limitations are offset past the higher time speeds. Nvidia harnesses these features to produce a squealing-end graphics card that delivers industry-leading graphics performance while drawing very petite ability (for a plug-in in its price rove).The GeForce GTX 680 is so Energy Department efficient that the standard room design features two six-pin PCIe power plugs, whereas most $500 graphics card game command one six-pin and one eight-trap to supply enough power.

Nvidia is introducing a handful of new technologies with the 600 series GeForce cards, too. GPU Boost is very similar to the Turbo Supercharge and Turbo Core technologies you see in Intel and AMD processors: If the card is track fairly cool and not drawing as well much big businessman, GPU Cost increase automatically bumps up the clock speeding for better performance. AMD does this with its graphics cards, and it's nice to visualise Nvidia adopting the conception. A new form of antialiasing, called TXAA, should help provide smoother edges with to a lesser extent of a hit to performance than other forms of antialiasing impose. Our tests picture information technology to be a very good tradeoff 'tween performance and quality. Adaptational vsync is another nice compromise 'tween the smoother execution of having hierarchical synchronization disabled and the artifact-free gaming of enabling vsync.

Naturally, if you're in the securities industry for a $500 artwork tease, you're principally concerned with how fast it is. The good news is that focus on energy efficiency hasn't cost Nvidia the performance crown. The GeForce GTX 680 manages to outpace its obvious competitor, AMD's similarly priced Radeon HD 7970, in most of our tests.

The improved tessellation performance in Nvidia's new chip helped information technology shine in synthetic tests like Unigine Heaven. It cranked out a very impressive score in 3DMark 11, too.

When we average the carrying into action of the two cards among four pop, modern, demanding games–Crysis 2, Just Cause 2, Dirt 3, and Metro 2033–we see the GTX 680 just barely edging out the Radeon HD 7970. In some games it's a bite faster, and in others it's a number slower; merely the overall performance is a unimportant higher. This is with a graphics card that is slightly cheaper (more or less $20 to $30 less if you shop around online) and uses a tad fewer power.

At the end of last twelvemonth, we praised AMD's Radeon HD 7970 for its passing pinched performance and fantastic energy efficiency. In the months since then, AMD has improved the card's performance foster with driver updates–and yet Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 680 still manages to gravel IT along some counts, typically draught less power and delivering slightly faster performance. Those advantages, together with the new TXAA and Adaptive vsync features, make IT a assoil winner. AMD's 7000 series relies on a art architecture that is drastically different from old AMD chips, so we may inactive see much better performance with driver improvements; but right now, if you hold $500 to spend on a artwork card, the GeForce GTX 680 is the better buy.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/469970/geforce_gtx_680_review_nvidias_impressive_efficient_new_graphics_card.html

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