NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Review: Ultra Expensive, Ultra Rare, Ultra Fast
by Ryan Smith on May 3, 2012 9:00 AM ESTTotal War: Shogun 2
Total War: Shogun 2 is the latest installment of the long-running Total War series of turn based strategy games, and alongside Civilization V is notable for just how many units it can put on a screen at once. As it also turns out, it’s the single most punishing game in our benchmark suite (on higher end hardware at least).
Unfortunately for NVIDIA they’re in a bit of a bind with Shogun 2. The March 22nd patch effectively broke Kepler performance under certain situations. GTX 680 performance has been nearly halved due to that patch; what was 33fps at 2560 is now 18fps. As near as we can tell this is a problem with the game – Shogun 2 wouldn’t know what the GTX 680 is and suddenly doesn’t know what to do with it – but the end result is that GTX 680/690 users are in trouble here.
As it stands 2560 is utterly broken – perhaps due to MSAA or shadowing – but our results at 5760 and 1920, which use the Very High profile, have not dropped due to the patch and as aresult we have at least some confidence in them. To that end while NVIDIA’s multi-GPU scaling is quite good at 5760 at 95%, not only does AMD have a lead over the GTX 680 with a single 7970, but Crossfire scaling is nearly perfect. Furthermore the GTX 690 once more has trouble boosting here, leading to a 7% deficit compared to the GTX 680 SLI. As a result the GTX 690 only reaches 85% of the performance of the 7970CF here. Things look better at 1920, but besides being a rather low resolution for the GTX 690 we’re also CPU limited by that point.
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tviceman - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
Last page: Based on our benchmarks we’re looking at 95% of the performance of the GTX "580 SLI" - 580 SLI should read 680 SLI.UltraTech79 - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
I wish there was a separate button to point out this sort of thing so they could silently correct it. Dont get me wrong, I think its good to have accurate information, just clutters things up a bit.Ryan Smith - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
My inbox is always open.=)mediaconvert - Friday, May 4, 2012 - link
p 2While the basic design of the GTX 690 resembles the GTX 590, NVIDIA has replaced virtually every bit "with plastic with metal" for aesthetic/perceptual purposes.
surely "with plastic with metal" to "of plastic with metal"
still a good review
rockqc - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
1st line on page 2 "Much like the GTX 680 launch and the GTX 590 before it, the first generation the first generation of GTX 690 cards are reference boards being built by NVIDIA"First generation has been written twice.
Torrijos - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
The first benchmark plotted (Crysis) has a resolution of 5760 x 1200, this has to be wrong!tipoo - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
It's crazy but right. He tested that resolution on multiple games.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
If you look at accumulated benchmarks across the web, the 680 Nvidia cards beat the 7970 amd cards by a much higher percentage in 1920x1080 (17.61% ahead) than they do in 1920x1200 (10.14% ahead).This means anand reviews always tests in 1920x1200 to give the amd cards a prettier looking review, instead of testing in 1920x1080 (the most commonly available resolution at 1920x that they could easily set their 1920x1200 monitors to).
Hence their tests here at anand are likely also amd favorably biased in higher resolutions.
http://translate.google.pl/translate?hl=pl&sl=...
A5 - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
It's not like 19x12 is an uncommon or unavailable resolution. Maybe Nvidia should improve their 19x12 performance?crimson117 - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
Sadly, it is a very uncommon resolution for new monitors. Almost every 22-24" monitor your buy today is 1080p instead of 1200p. :(