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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/
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.
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.