NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Benchmarked

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.

Unfortunately you won't be able to get one

[edxwelch]

According to Semiaccurate there's a mask design flaw in the GK104, which has caused poor yields. Less than 10,000 GTX 680s shipped worldwide, even though it's been released a month ago.
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/05/01/why-cant-nvidia-supply-keplergk104gtx680/ [semiaccurate.com]

Re:Big Fermi is still on the horizon...

[poly_pusher]

It's not ATI anymore... It's AMD. I'm a longtime fan of their hardware in general. The AMD X2 blew my mind when it came out. Currently their Vision and Fusion products are pretty awesome. Unfortunately Nvidia has been beating them pretty consistently in the GPU world for the past many generations regarding all around performance and stability. AMD always stays pretty close "on a lower R&D budget" most the time and edges them out for a while but Nvidia always comes back quickly with a punch. Even the mess that was the GTX 480 delay brought a card that smoked AMD in DX11 technology like tesselation. Nvidia always seems to choose the right place to focus their development.

Re:WTF

[Gadget_Guy]

I've seen it rumored in more than a few places that Tom's Hardware is very Intel and Nvidia, shall we say, "friendly".

That would explain why in their most recent Best Graphics Cards For The Money [tomshardware.com] AMD's cards only won 5 categories compare with Nvidia's massive win in 1 category (plus a tie in another and 3 categories with no winners). Basically if you ignore all the times that they say good things about AMD, then it is obvious that they favour Intel and Nvidia.

As for the original poster claiming big differences in the rankings, I just don't see it. If you filter out the cards that are not tested on both sites you get the following rankings:

Battlefield 3
Toms: 680GTX-SLI, 690GTX, 7970CF, 6990, 590GTX, 680GTX, 7970, 580GTX
Anan: 680GTX-SLI, 690GTX, 7970CF, 6990, 590GTX, 680GTX, 7970, 580GTX

Skyrim
Toms: 680GTX-SLI, 690GTX, 7970CF, 590GTX, 6990, 680GTX, 7970, 580GTX
Anan: 680GTX-SLI, 690GTX, 590GTX, 680GTX, 7970, 580GTX, 6990, 7970CF

DiRT 3
Toms: 680GTX-SLI, 690GTX, 7970CF, 680GTX, 6990, 590GTX, 7970, 580GTX
Anan: 680GTX-SLI, 690GTX, 7970CF, 590GTX, 680GTX, 6990, 7970, 580GTX

Metro 2033
Toms: 7970CF, 680GTX-SLI, 690GTX, 6990, 590GTX, 7970, 680GTX, 580GTX
Anan: 7970CF, 680GTX-SLI, 690GTX, 6990, 590GTX, 7970, 680GTX, 580GTX

Only Skyrim seems to show any major differences, and that was probably due to some driver issues, game version or alternative testing methods.