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Home News NVIDIA Jumps Back To The Top With The New GTX 680

GAMING NEWS

NVIDIA Jumps Back To The Top With The New GTX 680

Posted on Thursday, March 22 @ 15:12:37 Eastern by Jonathan_Leack

So if you've been keeping up with PC news, you are probably aware that AMD recently made a huge move with the Radeon HD 7970. Benchmarks showed an average of around a +20% increase in power over the Nvidia GTX 580, a similar single-GPU card in the $500-$550 price bracket. Well, while their run was strong, it was short lived, as Nvidia are now prepared for war, and they have the technology in their favor.

The Nvidia GTX 680 is now available for purchase, and it's extremely promising. Before we dive in, check out some of the key specs as it compares to its last-generation equivalent.
 
 
Right out of the gate, the big selling point of this new line of GeForce cards are their die-shrink. They're down to a 28nm process and as a result the power draw is significantly reduced, which has allowed Nvidia to bump up the horsepower substantially while retaining a low heat footprint. This strong balance of power and efficiency has caused the GTX 680 to dominate benchmarks with an improvement of about 12% in games such as Crysis 2 and Battlefield 3 versus its competitor, the AMD HD 7970.

So what does this all mean and why is it important? Well, some might argue that hardware has become stagnant and technology isn't evolving as quickly as they'd like. The truth of the matter is that Nvidia and AMD (formerly ATI) are battling as heavily as ever before, and their graphics cards are improving at an alarming rate. If you're expecting the next generation of consoles to have disappointing visual performance, don't fret, because this constant competition is causing phenomenal hardware to drop in price regularly.
Tags:   pc


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Comments
  • De-Ting
    De-Ting
    Joined: Nov 2006
    Posted: Mar 22nd, 2012 at 4:43 pm
    "this constant competition is causing phenomenal hardware to drop in price regularly."

    Yeah, right. Just like HDTVs, eh? >_>
    0 0
  • Merlin
    Merlin
    Joined: Oct 2005
    Posted: Mar 22nd, 2012 at 6:02 pm
    Should point out the 7970 was the high end range of the 7000 series for AMD right now while the 680 is actually the mid high low high end range for the kepler series. However the biggest of the bad might actually come out with the 700 marking on it before all is said and done but this is probably still six months away at best to see this monster take full form and what it can do.
    0 0
  • LawnGnome
    LawnGnome
    Joined: Apr 2007
    Posted: Mar 22nd, 2012 at 7:23 pm
    I have both AMD & Nvidia cards in my house. The biggest difference to me is that every-other AMD driver update tends to suck and be really buggy. I'll probably never buy another one because of this.
    0 0
  • Jonathan_Leack
    Jonathan_Leack
    Joined: Jan 2012
    Posted: Mar 22nd, 2012 at 7:32 pm
    I second this. My 5770 had quite a few pesky bugs.My second monitor would flicker whenever I started a movie or a game. Meanwhile, my GTX 570 has been flawless. I'll be sticking with Nvidia for a while.
    0 0
  • Toddy
    Toddy
    Joined: Sep 2011
    Posted: Mar 23rd, 2012 at 6:55 am
    Lucky you didn't have a 590 and the drivers let them catch fire.
    0 0
  • Merlin
    Merlin
    Joined: Oct 2005
    Posted: Mar 22nd, 2012 at 7:58 pm
    You guys should realize something though. You DONT have to upgrade every driver patch. In fact once you have a driver set that works well with the games your playing there is no need to do an update unless one of two things happen. 6 months pass and its time for a update or you have a bug or a glitch your seeing with a new game you bought and see if the update fixes it. Updating every single driver update is just asking for a headache sometimes. I've had my fair share of Nvida bad updates but I prefer the power they give me over AMD still. *pets his SLI 480's* Also keep in mind sometimes the game your playing itself might be buggy and not the drivers themselves. I had this problem recently with Arkhum city. Until the recent patch SLI was not a very good way to run the game sense the December patch last year. The video drivers had nothing to do with it.
    0 0
  • TurinAlexander
    TurinAlexander
    Joined: Sep 2006
    Posted: Mar 22nd, 2012 at 8:01 pm
    I've never had an issue with my AMD card, it runs everything I throw at it without complaint. Honestly, the games that are out now really don't need the ridiculous horsepower that people are able to throw at them. Sure, the tech is improving, but the games are not keeping pace. Game makers design games that can be played by the average user, not the guy running three linked cards that are overclocked to the point of insanity, hooked up to a liquid cooling system.

    Basically, what I'm saying is, the shiniest new toys don't interest me. Getting my FPS to go from 59 to 60 is hardly noticeable. Unless you're running on a massive screen, you don't need the power of these things to get the current generation of games to look good.
    0 0
  • Mobius_Sean
    Mobius_Sean
    Joined: Sep 2006
    Posted: Mar 22nd, 2012 at 9:35 pm
    To be fair it really seems PC game development has only really rolled on the throttle in the past 2-3 years. The impression I got was that as long as the current generation of consoles were the cutting edge, they were content to just port console games with higher res textures, so there wasn't much coming out that really demanded extreme hardware.

    As the 360 and PS3 have started getting a little long in the tooth, and at the same time developers have started seeing that yes, there are genres that just DON'T work on console (cough: strategy :cough:) we've seen some things coming out that demand a little more than a juiced 360 to run, such as Shogun 2 and the PC Battlefield 3. Just take a look at the new Unreal Tech demos rolling around. These cards may be irrelevant now, but in about 1-2 years I foresee them being put to very good use. I still remember when I built my dual 8800GTX DX10 machine 4 years ago, thinking it'd never need an upgrade with 6G RAM and the QX6700 processor.
    0 0
  • i1Arjun
    i1Arjun
    Joined: Mar 2012
    Posted: Mar 22nd, 2012 at 10:59 pm
    I made a review yesterday read here... Its better...

    0 0
  • i1Arjun
    i1Arjun
    Joined: Mar 2012
    Posted: Mar 22nd, 2012 at 11:00 pm
    Read more about GTX 680 here....

    0 1
  • Ivory_Soul
    Ivory_Soul
    Joined: Nov 2005
    Posted: Mar 23rd, 2012 at 1:17 am
    My 5870 can still handle everything I throw at it. I agree AMD's drivers suck, and it almost makes me want to get an NVIDIA card because of it.
    0 0
  • Toddy
    Toddy
    Joined: Sep 2011
    Posted: Mar 23rd, 2012 at 7:08 am
    They are both overpriced and although the 680 is in front, the 7970 is underclocked.

    AMD will respond by bringing out an 7980, (the 7970 with the clocks it should've had), and when Nvidia bring out the high end Kepler, AMD will be bringing out the 8000 series.

    Will probably wait until then to upgrade my trusty 4890.
    0 0
  • Bras
    Bras
    Joined: Jul 2008
    Posted: Mar 23rd, 2012 at 7:13 am
    I haven't had a problem with my HD4890 drivers ever, and for my next purchase I shall buy the card that has the most bang for the buck, regardless of brand.
    0 0
  • Mobius_Sean
    Mobius_Sean
    Joined: Sep 2006
    Posted: Mar 23rd, 2012 at 11:03 am
    Current newegg wishlist is rocking 2 6870s. Crossfire/sli can be great ways to save money with older cards. Only GPUs i've ever bought at the bleeding edge were the 8800GTXs, but I can say having futureproofed that machine to the extent that they did, they didn't save me any money, but i don't feel I overspent, either. Kinda hard to say whether I like the Nvidia control panel or CCC better. My laptop has ATI, and since I use it more during the school year, it always takes me a while to reacquaint with the Nvidia controls.
    0 0

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