NVIDIA GTX 680 Reviewed: A New Hope

Cyberlink MediaEspresso


The reason why we tested with Cyberlink MediaEspresso is because it features GPU accelerated encoding. This program uses NVIDIA's new NVENC codec which enables us to most accurately test NVIDIA's new video processing architecture. This program has both hardware and software acceleration, so what we've done is enable it and disable it for each GPU when paired with our Intel Core i7 3960X. This was by taking a 1080P video file and converting it to 720P with a very high bit-rate.

Looking at our benchmarks, you can see that the GTX 680 actually performs the best above all GPUs and even against an Intel Core i7 3690X. The GTX 680 did the conversion in 19 seconds while the CPU did it alone in 23. The GTX 590 did it in 36 seconds and the HD 7970 did it in 34 seconds. Interestingly, though, is that the non-hardware accelerated performance was faster with the 7970 than it was with the GTX 680 or GTX590. So, with this application at least, you either want to use the GTX 680 or just the CPU itself.