GTX 680 Concerns

I

IceDread

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Mar 26, 2010
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I have some concerns about gtx 680.

http://www.sweclockers.com/recension/15196-geforce-gtx-680-kepler-samt-sli/21#pagehead

For surround two cards are obviously needed for a good framerate.

But then, gtx 680 really is a bad choice since Amd 7970 in crossfire is significantly better than gtx 680 in crossfire.

So the choice is simple, two hd 7970 it is.

However, I've heard rumors about gtx 680 coming with 4 gb ram, that could make for some really powerful cards in higher resolutions. And even later, the gtx 110 gpu should launch, gtx 680 is the 104 gpu which really should have been named gtx 660 ti and not gtx 680. However, one could wait forever... there is always something about to be released.

What do you think about this?
 
I think those results are pretty atypical of Nvidia's recent performance with SLI, which normally shows much better scaling. I'd wait for some more reviews/testing before I made a decision either way. Could just be a driver issue that is already fixed, since that test was done with the 300.99 drivers instead of the newer 301.10 ones.
 
I would wait a bit personally. Nvidia have had good SLI and multimonitor scaling recently and the 680 seems to be the odd one out. Maybe the cards are tripping over themselves with boost or something, I dunno, but I think it's not a bad idea to wait and see if they can fix it up.

Unless you're desperate to get something now, in which case, yeah, I'd go 2 x 7970's.
 
I have a hd 5970 that is working but I'd like better performance, however not much time for gaming right now anyway so I guess waiting is an option. Thou building up a new comp would be nice...
 
I'd wait for newer nvidia drivers to see if scaling improves.
 
Early drivers, hell [H] posted an article about 7970 not scaling at all at launch.

Yes, there is always something better around the corner. Right now you can buy a single gpu solution that will perform about on par with GTX590 for $500, thats not bad.

To be honest if I cared about eyefinity I would wait a couple of weeks to see if prices on 7950 drop at all, GTX680 should push those prices down a bit.
 
For whats its worth i'm testing 680 sli right now and came from 7970 crossfire. I think the 680 has some early driver issues, some games are not scaling as well as they should (and 7970 comes ahead in quite a few games in xfire mode - all of the crysis games, metro 2033, alan wake, witcher 2).

I'd say give it a few weeks. At the very least, you want to wait for AMD pricecuts which I'd imagine will happen sometime in the coming weeks......It is day 2 so give it a bit for the driver situation to stabilize.
 
IceDread said:
However, I've heard rumors about gtx 680 coming with 4 gb ram, that could make for some really powerful cards in higher resolutions.

What do you think about this?
Click to expand...

Not really a rumor http://www.evga.com/articles/00669/#GTX680FTW

However, rather than choking on void of ram at higher resolutions, it chokes on void of bus. That 256-bit bus isn't going anywhere no matter how many GB's of ram you throw at it. And as far as I'm concerned, GTX680 is gimped because of this.
 
Pasanen said:
However, rather than choking on void of ram at higher resolutions, it chokes on void of bus. That 256-bit bus isn't going anywhere no matter how many GB's of ram you throw at it. And as far as I'm concerned, GTX680 is gimped because of this.
Click to expand...

Weird, because it has a lot of memory bandwith as is even with the 256 bit bus.
 
xoleras said:
For whats its worth i'm testing 680 sli right now and came from 7970 crossfire. I think the 680 has some early driver issues, some games are not scaling as well as they should (and 7970 comes ahead in quite a few games in xfire mode - all of the crysis games, metro 2033, alan wake, witcher 2).

I'd say give it a few weeks. At the very least, you want to wait for AMD pricecuts which I'd imagine will happen sometime in the coming weeks......It is day 2 so give it a bit for the driver situation to stabilize.
Click to expand...

I don' think that Alan Wake works with older cards in sli either. They never got around to making a working sli profile.
 
OpStar said:
Weird, because it has a lot of memory bandwith as is even with the 256 bit bus.
Click to expand...
Yea... I also find it weird, that Anand was pretty much the only site that tested this card with Crysis, and the results pretty much speak for themselves.

Now you may argue, that Crysis is an old game and irrelevant for todays standards or whatever, and yet it tells its tale of the state of high-end PC gaming in 2012: an engine released over four years ago is still the most definitive benchmark today, since everything else is either indies with no need for this much power or multiplats and console ports... with again no need for such power.

Whether CryEngine 2 was only poorly optimized engine is moot, as it still apparently trumps every single-gpu setup out there.
 
With a good memory overclock a 7970 can approach double the memory bandwidth.
 
Pasanen said:
However, rather than choking on void of ram at higher resolutions, it chokes on void of bus. That 256-bit bus isn't going anywhere no matter how many GB's of ram you throw at it. And as far as I'm concerned, GTX680 is gimped because of this.
Click to expand...

We're going to have to wait and see on the bus width thing. It still has the same memory bandwidth as the GTX 580 (and more than the GTX 590), and the same bus width as the 6970 (and 6990). Lower bus width doesn't automatically mean lower performance.
 
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