Nvidia launches the GTX 680 with brand new features.

Posted By: Steve McBarnes - 03:01:48 Thu, March 22, 2012

The GeForce GTX 680 is finally here, and it has features and tech that have never been seen before. If you would rather watch a video than read about these new fangled things, then I suggest giving this link a click. I will be writing an easy to understand article talking about all these new features later to today.

Looking at the reviews, it seems like Nvidia succeeded in making the most powerful single GPU card ever made, it is uses less power than competiton's flagship, and it also gives you more performance per dollar than the HD 7970.

The only thing holding the GTX 680 back is its 256-bit memory bus. If Nvidia had increased it to 512-bit or even 384-bit, the GTX 680 would have totally crushed the HD 7970. As it is, the GTX 680 has higher pixel and texture fill rates, but lower FLOPS and memory bandwidth. In fact, I just noticed this interesting story on TechPowerUp about how the GTX 680 was originally the GTX 670 Ti. It seems like Nvidia made a 256-bit chip that was so good that it beat the HD 7970 and thus could be branded as an 80 part instead of 70 part.

All the reference models look the same right aside from the different stickers, so I decided to show you an exciting GTX 680 model that is not available yet. This is a mock-up of a GTX 680 from Inno3D that comes with an attached liquid cooling system, not just a waterblock cooler. This could end up being something like Sapphire's Toxic X1950 XTX card.

Inno3D GTX 680 Liquid Cooling system mockup

1 Comments

Monday, March 26, 2012 2:17:11 PM

Casecutter
Member

It does a slight improvement in Fps on a couple of titles that such enthusiast cards are pressed or struggle with, but on raising the bar on truly demanding titles it's really "one-ups-man-ship". Power it's not that huge improvement when running in actual gaming runs, over the 5 titles [H] pulled power while playing the GXT680 it provides a 3% improvement. In perf/$ if you stick to those games they render at 30-60Fps, it's like 10% less $ for like 3-5% more FpS which is good, but you can OC the 7970 to beat that. I'm not saying they haven't a Home Run hitter, but that's only one run because I don't know what else they can get on base that can do this without the "juice" provided by thier "clock speed Nanny".

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