NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Benchmarked 119
MojoKid writes "NVIDIA has lifted the embargo on benchmarks and additional details of their GeForce GTX 690 card today. According to a few folks at NVIDIA, company CEO Jen Hsun Huang told the team to spare no expense and build the best graphics card they possibly could, using all of the tools at their disposal. As a result, in addition to a pair of NVIDIA GK104 GPUs and 4GB of GDDR5 RAM, the GeForce GTX 690 features laser-etched lighting, a magnesium fan housing, a plated aluminum frame, along with a dual vapor chamber cooler with ducted airflow channels and a tuned axial fan. The sum total of all of these design enhancements results in not only NVIDIA's fastest graphics card to date, but also one of its quietest. In the performance benchmarks, NVIDIA's new dual-GPU powerhouse is easily the fastest graphics card money can buy right now, but of course it's also the most expensive." The GeForce GTX 690 has been reviewed lots of different places today, Tom's Hardware and AnandTech to name a few.
WTF (Score:5, Interesting)
Tomshardware is showing GTX beating ATI by 50 - 200% in every benchmark. Anandtech shows the opposite with ATI still winning under the same games? Anyone else notice this?
Does Toms Hardware or Anandtech get paybacks from either company for biased remarks?
Big Fermi is still on the horizon... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm still waiting for the GK110-based "Big Fermi" due out Q3. Considering how well the 680 and 690 have performed the Gk110 will be a monster, probably power hungry but still a monster. Nvidia really hit gold with their latest generation, it is speculated that the current 680 was intended to be the 660 until it outperformed AMD's top offering. Can't wait to get my hands on a 4gb GK110.
Re:WTF (Score:4, Interesting)
who cares (Score:2, Interesting)
who is going to pay $1000 for a piece of hardware with a halflife of maybe one year? this card is really worth about $400 at most.. and the 680 should be $200. what games actually take advantage of this? there are hardly any pc games worth playing nowadays :\. It's too bad too, because I LIKE new graphics hardware. it's always fun to play with, but at $1000 I can't justify it.
I think people need to stop being so hyped up (Score:5, Interesting)
There is zero actual evidence that there is going to be a "GK110" this year, or that if there is it will be a high end part (bigger numbers in their internal code names don't always mean higher end parts).
I see people all in a lather about the supposed amazin' graphic card that is up and coming, and lots of furious rumors, but nothing in the way of any proof. I also can see some fairly good arguments as to why nVidia would NOT be releasing a higher end card later on (excluding things like Teslas and Quadros, which are higher end in a manner of speaking).
Speaking of Teslas and Quadros, that may be all that it is: A version of the hardware with a redesigned shader setup to give higher FP64 speed. As it stands the card is quite slow at FP64 calculations compared to FP32. It could be 50% of the speed, in theory, but is more like 1/16th. Basically it seems to be missing the necessary logic to link the 32-bit shaders together to do 64-bit calculations for all but a fraction of the shaders. Maybe to protect their high end market, maybe to keep size and heat down (since it does take additional logic). Whatever the case a Tesla/Quadro version with that in place would have much improved FP64 speed, and thus compute performance for certain things, but be no increase to gaming at all.
So I think maybe people need to settle down a bit and stop getting so excited about a product that may not even exist or be what they think, and may not launch when they think even if it is. Chill out, see what happens. Don't get this idea that nVidia has something way MOAR BETTAR that is Coming Soon(tm). You don't know that, and may be setting yourself up for a big disappointment.
Re:Unfortunately you won't be able to get one (Score:5, Interesting)
I would encourage people to look at the site's name before taking anything they say seriously. And then I'd encourage them to look in the archives (if they keep true and accurate archives of their past stuff, I've never checked) to see all the shit they get wrong (and there is a lot of it). Then maybe you understand that like most rumour sites, you don't want to take it too seriously.
For some overall perspective, consider that Charlie Demerjian, the guy who runs it, was given the boot from The Inquirer, which is not precisely what one would call a bastion of journalistic excellence.
As an example of one major madeup story from them, in February they claimed that the GTX680 would have a "PhysX Block" basically either dedicated hardware to speed up PhysX, or special instructions/optimizations for it at the expense of other things. They said that the supposed edge in benchmarks was only because of that, the 7970 would out do it in most games.
That is not at all the case, it turns out. The GTX680 has nothing particularly special for PhysX, other than a shit-ton of shaders, and it in fact outperforms the 7970 by a bit in nearly all game, including ones without PhysX. HardOCP (http://hardocp.com/article/2012/03/22/nvidia_kepler_gpu_geforce_gtx_680_video_card_review/) has them both tested with real gameplay, as usual.
So really, don't take anything that site says seriously. It is a blatant rumours site that just makes shit up.
Part of it depends on what you choose to bench (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't care for Anad's benches much because they seem to like synthetic compute benchmarks. That is really all kinds of not useful information for a game card. I want to see in game benchmarks. If any compute stuff is going to be benchmarked, let's have it be an actual program doing something useful (like Sony Vegas, which uses GPUs to accelerate a lot of what it does).
Personally I'm a HardOCP fan when it comes to benchmarks. Not only are they all about game benchmarks, but they are big on actual gameplay benchmarks. As in they go and play the game, they don't run a canned benchmark file. This does mean that it isn't a perfect, "each card sees the precisely equal frames" situation, but it is far more realistic to the task they are actually asked to do, and it all averages out over a play session. I find that their claims match up well with what I experience when I buy a card.
http://hardocp.com/article/2012/05/03/nvidia_geforce_gtx_690_dual_gpu_video_card_review [hardocp.com] is there 690 benchmark. It's a selection of newer games, generally played with triple head (the game displayed across three monitors at once) on a 690, 2 680s SLI'd and two 7970s CF'd.
Re:Slashvertisement (Score:4, Interesting)