NVIDIA GTX 680 Reviewed: A New Hope

SiSoft Sandra 2012
In SiSoft Sandra 2012, we will be testing the GPU's various compute capabilities, GPGPU, as well as its rendering and CUDA peformance.

First off, we've got GPGPU Processing running straight off of the compute shader. In SiSoft Sandra, everything is measured in Mpix/s which is how they benchmark compute capability. Here we'll be comparing the GTX 680 vs the HD 7970. As you can see, in float shader (single precision) the GTX 680 delivers 3,380 MPix/s while the HD 7970 delivers 3,200 MPix/s so in this case the GTX 680 out performs the HD 7970 by a small margin. In Double Shader (double precision), though, the tables are turned significantly and the GTX 680 only reports 114.79 MPix/s while the HD 7970 delivers 662.32 MPix/s.



Moving onto OpenCL processing capability we once again see a similar trend. Except, in this benchmark, the AMD HD 7970 out performs the NVIDIA GTX 680 in both float shader and double shader performance tests by a pretty significant margin in both tests. In the Float test, the GTX 680 scores 3,006 MPix/s while the HD 7970 delivers.


 
In Compute Shader Cryptography, the gap widens further with the GTX 680 only scoring 6.548 GB/s in Encryption/Decryption Bandwidth, while the HD 7970 scores 29.869 GB/s. This trend continues in the Hashing Bandwidth benchmark with the GTX 680 delivering 9.93 GB/s while the HD 7970 delivers 23.729 GB/s. Looking at these results, the GTX 680 does not appear to be as useful of a compute GPU as we might have thought, which may have to do with NVIDIA's future plans.



In OpenCL Cryptography, though, NVIDIA does once again show its single precision advantage by quite a bit by returning the favor to AMD. AMD beat NVIDIA by about 5X in Compute Shader Encryption/Decryption Bandwidth, and NVIDIA beats AMD by about 5X in OpenCL Encryption/Decryption Bandwidth. The GTX 680 delivers 10.889 GB/s in Encryption/Decryption Bandwidth while the HD 7970 offers 2.363 GB/s. The tables, though, do get flipped in OpenCL Hashing Bandwidth where the GTX 680 offers only 4.62 GB/s of Hashing Bandwidth, while the HD 7970 delivers 18.966 GB/s.



In Video Rendering, we see the GTX 680 deliver 1,069 MPix/s in Float Shaders while the HD 7970 beats it with 1,456 MPix/s. In the Double Shaders benchmark, we see a continuation of this trend, with the GTX 680 delivering 114.79 MPix/s and the HD 7970 quadrupling it with 471.35 MPix/s. Needless to say, the 7970 handily wins this benchmark.



Last but not least, we have CUDA processing capability where we compare the GTX 680 against the GTX 590. In this benchmark we see that the Float Shader test yields the GTX 680 with 2,702 MPix/s slightly edging out the dual Fermi GPU GTX 590 with 2,610 MPix's indicating a huge performance increase over the Fermi generation of GPUs in terms of single precision performance. When it comes to the Double Shaders test, though, the GTX 590 beats the GTX 680 by putting up 471.35 MPix/s to the GTX 680's 204 MPix/s.

Looking at our GPGPU performance and results against the HD 7970, the GTX 680 struggles significantly in double precision tests. The only benchmarks where the GTX 680 doesn't get handily beaten in are in the tests where its single precision capabilities outpace those of the 7970.