NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Preview

[Rob Williams]

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 is here. Based on Kepler, it's an interesting beast. It features a reworked architecture, is produced on a 28nm process, introduces things like GPU Boost, Adaptive VSync and TXAA, has a redesigned cooler, and perhaps most important of all, aims to perform better than the competition.

Check out our full preview of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 and discuss it here.

[Doomsday]

Sweetness!!

[Greg King]

Oh Max Payne. I have missed dearly.

[Kougar]

GK104 is one hell of a card for gaming, it wins in performance, power, and price. But it gives up compute performance to get there. And because my 480 does just fine in any game I've tried I see no reason to upgrade on game performance alone.

GK110 will be interesting when it launches later this year. It's up in the air if this will even be sold to consumers at this point for a myriad of reasons I won't delve into here, but it's the genuine Kepler core that was announced to deliver 3-4x the compute performance of Fermi. At nearly twice the die size of the GK104 core, it retains the original hardware scheduler found in the 580 (which the 680 removed to reduce die size) and is what severely crimped compute performance. Not much is really known otherwise as to CUDA core counts or anything else, but for general compute pruposes the GK110 is the card to wait for. And the one I'll be watching for.