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.
Re:Finally (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to mention Minesweeper!
Re:Slashvertisement (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably not much (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Slashvertisement (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, except the GTX 6xx series is slower at CUDA processing than its predecessors. This is a gaming product. Nvidia did this on purpose, sacrificing some compute speed in favour of rendering performance and power efficiency. They also artificially limit double-precision FP speed on consumer boards, to steer professional users toward the Quadro.
As a result of this hobbling, GPU computing hobbyists tend to gravitate toward the Radeon, which has outperformed the GeForce in OpenCL for a few years now, in both performance-per-dollar and performance-per-watt.
Re:Big Fermi is still on the horizon... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're doing serious GPGPU stuff, you shouldn't be relying on fickle consumer boards in the first place. This is a gaming card marketed to extreme gamers. I've fooled around with CUDA stuff like raytracing and H.264 encoding, mostly as a curiosity, but the reason I bought this quad-SLI setup years ago was for games and real-time 3D rendering. I couldn't care less about FP performance, and neither does Nvidia's target market for this product line.
GPGPU on consumer cards is still a novelty at this point. We're getting close to the tipping point, but for most users, as long as it plays their game and can handle 1080p video, they're content. If and when that balance tips in favour of OpenCL and CUDA, both GPU manufacturers will adjust their performance targets accordingly. Their #1 priority is still 3D gaming for now.
Hmmm, and what uses FP32 workloads? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh that's right: Video games. You know, the thing it was made for.
The GTX series are nVidia's gaming cards. They are made for high performance when you wanna play 3D games. They aren't made for compute performance. That is not to say they cannot handle compute stuff, just that it isn't what they are primary designed for. So the kind of compute stuff they are the best at will be more related to what games want.
Their compute products with be the Teslas. They are made for heavy hitting compute performance of all kinds. If you are after purely GPGPU stuff, they are what you want.
nVidia seems to be separating their designs for the two to an extent. Still common over all design, but concentrating on making the desktop GPUs more efficient, at the expensive of high end computer features (like Integer and FP64 power), and the workstation/compute cards good at everything, even if they need beefier power and are louder.
I'm ok with that. I buy a GeForce to play games, not to do high end GPGPU stuff. We buy Teslas at work for that.
Also, there's a shitload of other things out there GPGPU wise that are FP32, and the 680 really is killer at that. Does a great job accelerating video encoding and the like.
Re:who cares (Score:5, Insightful)
Normally I'd have preordered two of these already, but it's too rich for my blood right now. This card is for us nutjobs who want quad-SLI and panoramic "3D Surround", with our custom-built driving cockpits and 3 large monitors, or the equally obsessive flight sim crowd. In my case, these displays run at 2560x1440 and that requires a ton of memory bandwidth on each card, just to push all those bits around.
For almost everyone else, a single $300 GPU is enough to run just about any game at 1920x1080 with very respectable settings.
As for your suggested prices, you're just talking out of your ass. If you're going to lowball the latest and greatest GPU on the market, maybe you should set games aside for a while and look at your income. Even though I agree the price is a bit high, spending $1000 on a hobby is nothing. You save up for that shit, and it lasts a very long time. My current cards are over 3 years old, so it works out to just over a dollar a day for kickass gaming graphics. Even if I played for just a few hours a week, it's still cheaper than any other form of modern entertainment. Cheaper than renting a movie, cheaper than a single pint at the pub, cheaper than basic cable TV, cheaper than bus fare to get to and from a free goddamned concert. For what I get out of it, having the highest end gaming hardware ends up being a sweet deal.
Re:I miss the days (Score:3, Insightful)
Mostly multihead gaming. While a $150 card is plenty at 1080p, at 5400x1920 or 4320x2560 it's a different story.
Re:Probably not much (Score:5, Insightful)
That's only true if you're running a 60Hz low-mid res display, say 1920x1200(~2.3 megapixels) or less. Though, even then the actual retail price of such a card, most of the time , will probably closer to $250 than $150.
If you want to run 120Hz, or run 2560x(1600|1440)(~3.7-4.1 megapixels), or run 3+ monitors in an eyefinity configuration(~4-24.5 megapixels), then you need all the power you can get.
Yes, but the GGP was addressing someone complaining about the cost of the card, not someone who's running a fucking surround-video in their replica Cessna cockpit. Anyone who's dishing out for high end displays isn't going to (justifiably) complain about the price of the card(s) needed to drive them. For everyone else, like the OP, a $150 GPU will play almost any game on their standard 1920x1080 60Hz display with decent performance settings just fine.