NVIDIA GTX 680 Reviewed: A New Hope

Futuremark 3DMark 11

In Futuremark's 3DMark 11, we tested all three different levels of the benchmark's performance against all of the cards we had in our arsenal to see which cards performed the best. We will also be using 3DMark 11 to measure our overclock performance and scaling as well.



In 3DMark 11 we got some interesting results. The GTX 680 outperformed the GTX 590 (and every subsequent GPU) in the Entry level benchmarks with a score of E14517 while the GTX 590 scored E14512 and the HD 7970 E12185. In the Performance benchmark, though, the GTX 590 outperformed the GTX 680 by scoring P9851 while the GTX 680 scored P9738, a difference of about 1-2 percent. Once you take into consideration that you're basically comparing two Fermi GPUs in SLI against a single Kepler GPU, you realize that this is actually extremely impressive that the GTX 680 and GTX 590 are trading punches in a synthetic benchmark. The HD 7970 comes in 3rd at P8083 in the Performance test. In our Extreme test, the most intensive of all the 3DMark 11 benchmarks, the GTX 590 edges out the GTX 680 once again by a few percentage points with the GTX 680 scoring X3177 and the GTX 590 X3307. Once again, the HD 7970 came up in 3rd place with X2756.

Looking at these results, we can definitely see the GTX 680 shining above all other competition with it effectively performing at the same levels as a GTX 590. Since the GTX 590 is a dual Fermi part, it is pretty nice to see NVIDIA's single GPU part beating and keeping even with NVIDIA's previous generation dual GPU part. This doesn't even take into account that the GTX 680 consumes about 20% less power than the GTX 590 and HD7970.

Unigine Heaven 3.0

In Unigine Heaven, we decided to go all out and not run the benchmark at the same settings that everyone else runs their as at. Instead, we opted to run the benchmark at its absolutely full capacity. That means that we went and turned up every possible setting we could to its maximum setting. We ran the DX11 benchmark at 1920x1080 (not the standard 1600x900) and we turned Tessellation to Extreme, Shaders to High, Anisotropy to 16X, Stereo 3D Disabled and Anti-Aliasing to 8X all while running full screen.



During our benchmarks, we noticed that the GTX 590 actually delivered the best overall performance above both the GTX 680 as well as the HD 7970, but we noticed significant jitteriness in the frames as well as jitters in the shadow movement. Even though both the GTX 680 and HD 7970 performed lower than the GTX 590, the GTX 680 really had the smoothest experience. Looking at the graph above, we can see that the HD 7970 had a minimum FPS of 23.6 while the GTX 680 came in at 25.9 and the GTX 590 at 26.5. The average frame rates were 46.9 for the GTX 680and 51.3 for the GTX 590, with the HD 7970 coming in even at 43. Max FPS were 103.3 for the HD 7970 as well as 120.1 for the GTX 680 and 121.7 for the GTX 590.