Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 Benchmarked: Equal Or Faster Than Radeon HD 7970

Click for larger image

Up until now, we have not had any solid Kepler GK104 results other than those obtained from Nvidia’s internal testing. Internal tests are normally cherry-picked to show the product in question in only the very best light and, as such, normally paint an unreliable and inflated picture. Today test results emerged which were performed by a third party – neither Nvidia nor one of their AIC (add-in card) partners were involved in the testing. Being a mid-range GPU from the Kepler family (with the top dog being the yet-to-be seen GK100) with a TDP of under 200 watts, the card proves to be on the impressive side.

The tester pitted the card against both the Radeon HD 7970 and the GeForce GTX 580 with all three cards running at stock clock speeds on the following system:

Click for larger image

The following benchmarks were run at 1920×1080, with some having 8x MSAA applied (stated on applicable graphs):

3DMark 11 Extreme Preset
3DMark 11 Performance Preset
Battlefield 3
Batman: Arkham City
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
Unigine Heaven
Lost Planet 2

The card not only drew less power but also ran cooler than the Radeon HD 7970, and temperatures were down compared to the GeForce GTX 580 as well. No temperature testing was done on the GeForce GTX 580. The results are viewable in the slides below. It should be noted that the version of GPU-Z used, 0.5.9, will not correctly detect the correct stock clock speed of 1,006 MHz as Dynamic Clock Adjustment is a completely new concept – newer than the current version of GPU-Z. Source — HKEPC

Click for larger image