Nvidia 680 GTX Inbound

[Terminal Meltdown]

DELETE

Edited December 23, 2013 by Terminal Meltdown

[EtherealN]

"For a $100 more than HD7970 you will be getting almost a 45% faster card"

 

Wow... They deduced that from leaked basic specifications? That's... interesting... :P

[Druid_]

Of course this is still speculation but at some point you have to ask yourself how big the market is for a VGA card the costs the same as a decent laptop. Especially when much lower priced cards run most games with settings high at 60+ FPS.

 

I'm a little surprised that they haven't increased the GDDR5 memory beyond 2 GB (however manufacturers may come out with different flavours later) since the multimonitor crowd have most to benefit from the GTX680 and with that price tag!

 

I'm not complaining though, roll on faster/better vga cards. I just wish the price was lower. Intel can bring out faster new CPUs without hiking the price up, why can't the vga card manufacturers?

Edited February 3, 2012 by Druid_

[Kuky]

Unless nVidida follow ATI path and start producing video cards that can run more than 2 monitors, they don't need more than 2GB of video RAM.

 

PS: I like the thread title... kinda "copies" the one from 7970 :D

[scheffchen]

500 internal server error

 

seems they got overrun =)

[sobek]

When I get home, I don't want to sit down and mess with drivers all night trying to figure out which one will or won't work just to play a damn game, only to find it's still not going to work even 3 years later because ATI's driver support sucks donkey balls.

 

Are you sure that your problems aren't PEBCAC related? Long time ATI customer here without any problems whatsoever.

[PoleCat]

I will never buy a top of the line card. It is a waste of money IMHO. Value falls away like water off a roof.

 

I think a card two steps down from the best in each of Nvidia's and ATI's line is the right value for the money.

 

400-500 for a Video card is insane money.

 

Out

[agrasyuk]

Are you sure that your problems aren't PEBCAC related? Long time ATI customer here without any problems whatsoever.

 

usually thats the first thing i suspect, but there is something about ATI. i had 4870 for over two years and never had special problems with. it was the cheaper low VRAM model so i decided to try friends gtx470 to see how having more VRAM improves things. while at it I decided to measure how much more power it pulls from the socket. to my surprise i found out it is less! upon further investigation i found that my 4870 never idled! even in plain windows 2d mode it was working full blast sucking electricity heating up my room. 2 years... makes me sick.

[sobek]

Notice how Sypre and Gr33nGecko talk total shhit to the their customers on the ATI forums like they are dumbasses and blame them for their incompetency -- like Sobek is doing now -- in every complaint thread about the product. Go read their complaints on the ATI board.

 

Neither did i blame you for incompetence nor call you a dumbass, so calm down.

 

Yes, the multi GPU products have problems, so do those of other manufacturers. I never got what the hype about those was all about.

 

So far, all i can say is that i have had only positive experience with ATIs cards (i use only single GPU cards, though). The complaints you raise about driver quality are IMHO generalisations that do not apply to all products.

 

Besides that, take a step outside and cool your head. If you continue with your attitude, you are going to butt heads with the moderator staff.

Edited February 3, 2012 by sobek

[EtherealN]

As an aside, id I remember things right, nVidia does have slightly less problems with multi-GPU stuttering on the newer cards. However there is a cost to this - what they basically do (at driver level) is to delay the faster frames to ensure a more smooth frame delivery.

 

I'm not exactly sure what I feel about that method myself. You can do the same thing with an AMD card, but it might require the use of a 3rd party configuration utility like RivaTuner or something. (I haven't used AMD/ATi in a LONG time so I don't know.) Needing a 3rd party utility like that is of course sucky from some perspectives, but on the other hand, as faras I know there's no way for the user to turn the nVidia feature off either, meaning that there is a slight gimping going on that you can't do anything about - again, unless you use 3rd party tools.

 

That said, I'm not the multi-GPU expert, since I've never used such setups myself, so take my words with a grain of salt. My knowledge comes from memory of articles I have nerded myself through, not actual experience, in this case. :)

 

Another thing I'd like to say is that I too share the experience (as a spectator) that Radeons have a lot more driver-related problems than GeForces. But that's the thing - this is extremely susceptible to confirmation bias. It could be that they have equal problems, but I remember them differently since I have a pre-conceived notion going on. The human brain is crap at performing statistical analyses and we do well to remember that. :)

[hassata]

I've been with ATI since the 9800, now on the 6970. They have served me like champions through every sim up to present-day DCS. No other choice for multi-monitor now, anyway.

[Mustang]

I can't complain about the 6850 i've just purchased, it's damn sweet :)

[scheffchen]

my 2 cents:

wouldn´t buy ATI now and in the near future (last ATI card was x1900xt):

You always read: poor driver support, occasional (driver related?) crashes on ATi-cards (hello kuky), bad tesselation (fixed 1 year too late) or inferior quality rendering.

After all with multi-GPU or Multi-Monitor I had no problems so far with gtx470 or 580, so I´m happy about it.

With my SLI I don´t care for crossfire-driver-preferences-whatsoeverthecrap: I just start the game and fine.. I dont change profiles or anything. I just start the game and it never crashes.

 

@Terminal Meltdown

I totally loved your funny posts and I can really understand you. :)

Only strange thing is, that NVIDIA is very quit about their 6xx series (reminds me of Faildozer). But we´ll see ^^

 

Greetings

Boris

 

PS: I believe it´s the same with GPUs as it is with CPUs: Buy the market leader and things will work (and your wallet be empty) ;)

[diveplane]

nvidia imo remain the best video card company.

[EtherealN]

scheffchen - the bad tesselation thing isn't just down to AMD/ATi though. There were some games (like HAWX if I remember right) that were sponsored by nVidia, and they actually made the games use a non-standard tesselation algorithm in order to make it run worse on Radeons - while the nVidia cards and drivers were prepared for it.

 

For myself, I'll decide what I like best when we start seeing actual reviews of the 680. A lot of things can change in a single generation and the proof is always in the pudding.

[Kuky]

nVidia can't complete with multimonitor support... it just lags years behind ATI in this department... and actually the performance going down when running multimonitor is not because they all run of the same video card... in fact it runns better of the same video card then having 2 or 3 ;)

 

ATI video cards do have better image quality and that was the first thing I noticed when I bought my first ATI card many years ago... and they perform better at higher resolution and AA/Af levels... you can call me a fanboy but that's a fact ;)

 

And regarding stuttering in CF.. well if you were to read many reviews and post from people that have either CF or SLI they all have this same issue.

 

My only gripe with ATI is that they really should not ever release a new product and not have propper support for it... good example is HD7970 release... today I got reply from AMD tech support and they basically said they couldn't help me with issues with DCS titles and that their RC11 driver is just a BETA and that first video Catalyst suite to propperly support HD7900 series will be Catalyst 12.3

 

You can buy anything you like nVidia or ATI, I don't care... I know my reasons why I buy ATI so no need to call people stupid or fanboys because your reasons and needs for wanting to stick with nVidia do not reflect my needs or anyone elses.

[EtherealN]

ATI video cards do have better image quality and that was the first thing I noticed when I bought my first ATI card many years ago... and they perform better at higher resolution and AA/Af levels... you can call me a fanboy but that's a fact ;)

 

If you say so...

 

When I look through several games, to me it seems like both just keep trading places for the better performance depending on which game it is. Further, saying either company gives better image quality is a bit weird - especially when based on a transition that happened years ago. They generally trade places with generation there as each tweaks their rendering schedules and drivers. (The one place where I feel Radeon has had a general advantage for a while is the AF on the lower-power cards.)

 

And regarding stuttering in CF.. well if you were to read many reviews and post from people that have either CF or SLI they all have this same issue.

 

Varies a bit though. :P

 

Incidentally, below is the reason why I decided to stay with a single 560Ti:

 

Urgh. If it had been a 580 I already had it would have been fine, but then again, if I had a 580 I suspect I wouldn't even consider SLI at all since I'd have other things to spend money on. :P

[Kuky]

Sorry EtherlealN but both CF and SLi do have microstuttering don't know what you tried to prove there? And in my experience ATI cards do have better image quality, and although the 580 does beat 6970 in some games, sides are reversed in others... and I tend to think that 580 costs more so really it should perform better on average... but even if it does it's no substitude if it can't run more than 2 monitors :P

[EtherealN]

What I tried to prove was exactly what was there. :P

 

First: both do have microstutter problems on multi-GPU solutions, but do a quick compare there of the 6970 and the 580. Basically that's there is the difference between something painful and something you don't even notice. 560 is also not exactly a good child there, but really - the difference in this area is more than "well both have problems". In the Radeon case, you'll have severe microstutter in with every single card. With Geforces you'll have microstutter at 560Ti and lower. This is basically the reason why I generally recommend nVidia for multiGPU solutions unless extensive eyefinity is what's going on.

 

Also there is a severe difference between "and they perform better at higher resolution and AA/Af levels" and "and although the 580 does beat 6970 in some games, sides are reversed in others". The latter one is true, the former smells of a more general statement that I have not seen any evidence to indicate that it's true. Indeed, I say they're roughly at a draw there - well, rather, 680 and 5970 are at a draw. Whatever they did with the 6970 to make it suffer so bad in so many games I don't know. :P

 

Here's their average across all tests:

 

It seems fair that the 6970 is cheaper than the 580 when the former actually averages out only at the 580's cheaper cousin - the 570. ;)

The more abstract concept of performance/dollar (which they basically do by taking that average score and splitting the dollar price up, though these are dollar prices that are a bit old now so grain of salt) give another picture - 6970 and 570 end up at roughly the same performance per dollar:

 

That said, with the 7970 not being an abysmal fail like the 6970 (I was a bit "huh?" when it was released and I saw it repeatedly perform notcieably worse than the card it was replacing), the battle between the 680 and 7970 will be interesting.

[galagamo]

I've also had issues 'yes driver related' with Radions particularly the 5850, which I replaced with a GTX480, of which the stock heat sink was utter fail, so I bought an AM heat sink and it was almost a perfect specimen of a GPU.

I had a little cash once so I bought an ASUS GTX580 directCU awesome!

Hate to be a fanboi, but. Tally me team green:D

[EtherealN]

Heh, yeah, the cooling solution on the 480 really was an abysmal fail. The standard for 580's is a bit better, but they really want the custom solutions offered by vendors like ASUS and MSI. To be honest I expect the same to hold true for the 6xx series as well.

 

That said, solutions like the DirectCUII are available for AMD as well (though I haven't checked the whole lineup), and I do have a major gripe with DirectCUII - the vRAM doesn't even have a heatsink! It does an awesome job cooling the GPU, but it feels a bit cheap to not do anything at all for the vRAM.

 

For those who want to go balls-to-the-walls with SLI it will also be interesting to see if nVidia can keep the microstutter issues under control on the 680. They did a good job with the 570 and 580, but that's another of the "wait and see" type things. Unfortunately that's an aspect that I suspect we'll have to wait a bit even after release to get proper tests of, since it can sometimes be hard for the review sites to ask for not one but two review articles.

Edited February 5, 2012 by EtherealN

[Pyroflash]

If I may add something. As a LONG time buyer of ATI cards (starting with the old X800's), I haven't had all that many issues with them personally up until very recently. As you can see in my signature I have a HD 5870, which is an alright card. It isn't bad, and it was excellent for its time (two years ago roughly). However, recent driver packages for it have absolutely removed my access to the CCC, and on top of that, every single driver "update" removes my settings and forces me to reconfigure them from scratch.

 

Based on my recent experiences, I fully intend to purchase one the new 6xx series cards when they come out, and as I only use one monitor anyways, it shouldn't cause me any issues. More importantly, I should stop getting lag in DCS from looking at too many high poly objects on an airfield (beautiful as they really are).

[Cali]

Pyroflash, do you install the new driver every month? I have a 8800GT and I haven't installed a new driver for over 1 1/2 to 2 years. If you are install them to fix problems you can always roll back if the driver is worse. The old saying "if it aint broke they don't try to fix".

 

Have nVidia figured out a way to run more then 2 monitors off one card yet?

[RIPTIDE]

Left ATi in 2008 for their shite drivers. I'll never go back. I had them all from 9200 SE to X2900XT... then the inevitable driver issues that got so many before caught up with me. Around the same thime there was a good few games released... you know the "The way it's meant to be played" games ;) Jumped to green. Driver problems vanished.

Edited February 7, 2012 by RIPTIDE

[EtherealN]

Have nVidia figured out a way to run more then 2 monitors off one card yet?

 

Not sure if they've figured it out or not (I think they probably have), but they haven't bothered implementing it on consumer cards. I suspect they might consider it more of an enterprise type thing. (Which AMD seems to agree with, since they've started reducing the amount of outs on cards to more "normal" ranges even if they could support 6.)