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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.
Finally I can play minecraft the way it was meant to be played!
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?
http://saveie6.com/
The GTX 680 and 690 have turned out to be pretty spectacular. The most impressive aspect is the relatively low power consumption for a high performance card.
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.
Actually high performance computing has created more demand. Nvidia GPU's are being used in massive supercomputers using OpenCL and CUDA. "AMD GPU's support OpenCL." There are a many more people who are interested in the latest and greatest GPU than you may think, specifically on a news for nerds site. So yeah, sweat article and thanks for the heads up about the new benches MojoKid.
I got an AMD 6870 over a year ago ($150), and it's played everything I've thrown at it just fine with maxed graphics. Skyrim, Witcher 2, etc play without any stutter and look wonderful. All on an AMD 965 (3.4 Ghz X4) CPU from the year prior.
I'm just trying to figure out what I'm missing by not spending 5x that price.
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/
I always harp about this but in a couple of years there will probably be a game that requires that much power. However by that time there will be a $150 card that can run it.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
The only game my Radeon couldn't handle at top graphics was FFXIV. And the only person I've ever met that got XIV to benchmark at max graphics was running on a brand new $2000 rig with SLI. 95% of us won't need a card this powerful, but I bet more than 5% of us sort of want one anyway.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
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.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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.
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.
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.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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 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.
You mean BitCoin mining don't you? That is the only thing you can consider "faster" with OpenCL, while actually using it for a real purpose.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I've been watching my UPS power load meter since I upgraded from a GTX 560 to a GTX 680. I'd estimate the 680 uses a bit less than half the power of the 560 when idle. At peak usage the 680 uses more, but only by a hair.
I was never happy with the 560 in general. The 3D performance was surprisingly glitchy at 1080p. Even though I wasn't too keen on trying NVIDIA again after that, I gotta admit they won me back with the 680.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Mostly multihead gaming. While a $150 card is plenty at 1080p, at 5400x1920 or 4320x2560 it's a different story.
Meh, if there was a reasonable (no, a $36000 Eizo doesn't count) 4K/QFHD monitor I'd consider it. I don't like triple screen setups with their bezels and odd aspect ratio with stretching and whatnot, I want it all on one screen. IMO the problem is not the price of the graphics card, it's having something useful to show it on. Even at 2560x1440 I'd have to pay more for a single monitor than for a 680 GTX, which is why I'm still on a good 1920x1200 IPS monitor. Of course it helps that I'm not a FPS junkie but I'd easily want Skyrim in 4K.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This is a 2560*1440 monitor for $320. The early ones had higher quality internals, and could actually run at 100hz at that resolution. They're shipped direct from Korea.
People saying they're running on maximum settings, without mentioning the pixel count are being disingenuous. The above monitor pushes over 3.5 million pixels. 1336*768 is about 1 million.
I'm sorry but this is NOT insightful, because NOBODY is gonna use GEFORCE cards in supercomputers, as their FP is just too shitty. if you would have been talking about an AMD since that company is pushing their lines towards a single design (they are even switching their GPUs from VLIW to Vector to get more GPGPU performance) then yes, you would be correct. but this is Nvidia we are talking about here who have been consistently separating their GPGPU line (Tesla) and their gamer line (Geforce) and the two lines are NOT identical, nowhere even close.
So I'm sorry friend but this is NOT for supercomputers, this is for showing you have the largest ePeen on the benchmark boards or triple monitored Skyrim. If you wanted to argue they are testing designs on the gamers, kinda like how RHEL uses Fedora as a testbed? that might be possible, but nobody is gonna buy geforce cards (which the FP has gone down not up with these latest cards) to slap into supercomputers.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
after looking at all the other charts for a single card it is indeed the fastest. interesting that for skyrim the crossfire places almost bottom and even blow the non crossfire solution.
for the compute section likely this is an architectural difference and demonstrating the same calculations that make AMD rock bitcoin mining too.