GTX 680 To have the crown back?

[davemaster84]

Hi people. Today I found that the past August 27th nvidia released a new beta driver, the 306.02, and after installing it I found out that it improves around 10% the overall performance, well at least in unigine haven benchmark and crysis 2(didn't have time to test more), so I ran unigine 3.0 with default settings at 1920 x 1080 and I got 119 fps compared to the 109 fps I used to get with the last beta driver, so now I ask , isn't this enough to match, or even to outrun the reference 7970?

Here are my specs:

Gigabyte 990 fxa ud3
Phenom II 955 OCed to 3.8
8 gb ram Ripjaws 1600mhz
MSI Nvidia gtx 680 reference model (no OC)
Win 7 64 bit

 

[Kamen_BG]

The GTX 680 is alreadu faster than the reference HD 7970.
The only HD 7970 that's faster than a GTX 680 is the HD 7970 GHZ Edition.

 

[Pinhedd]

Drivers can only do so much for performance. They are not able to pull shaders, ROPs, or compute units out of nowhere. New drivers are known for improving performance in one synthetic benchmark while giving ground in another. AMD isn't exactly sitting still either, the Catalyst 12.8 drivers are very good.

 

[davemaster84]

If that's so Toms hardware should advise that the article they made was about an special 7970, not the standard 7970, otherwise people like me who read it may get confused. I really would love to compare the 7970ghz edition vs the gigabyte SOC edition.

Anyway in fact if we compare the standard ships the gtx 680 is the fastest sigle gpu video card

 

[Pinhedd]

If that's so Toms hardware should advise that the article they made was about an special 7970, not the standard 7970, otherwise people like me who read it may get confused. I really would love to compare the 7970ghz edition vs the gigabyte SOC edition.

Anyway in fact if we compare the standard ships the gtx 680 is the fastest sigle gpu video card

It's pretty well accepted that AMD shipped the 7970 with absurdly low reference clocks. I run both of mine at 1100 without issue. The 7970 not only overclocks better, it scales better with higher clocks. While the 680 reference card may beat the reference 7970 in many 1080p and lower benchmarks, the 7970 wins out in 2560x1600 benchmarks. When overclocked slightly to around 1000mhz (a modest 8% which is an average OC for most factory overclocked cards) they pair off at 1080p while the 7970 retains its lead at higher resolutions.

They are both excellent cards and these kinds of threads are stupid

 

[davemaster84]

Ehh I wouldn't call it a "stupid" thread, actually the ones that stated such kind of thing was Tom's reviewers, not to mention what they did with the 670 review (basically they buried the 680) . So if you think this kind of comparisons are stupid please do the same with the reviews Tom's published.

 

[Pinhedd]

Ehh I wouldn't call it a "stupid" thread, actually the ones that stated such kind of thing was Tom's reviewers, not to mention what they did with the 670 review (basically they buried the 680) . So if you think this kind of comparisons are stupid please do the same with the reviews Tom's published.

I do. Not necessarily with Toms but with a lot of reviewing outlets in general.

When the 7970 came out AMD didn't have full driver support for it. It was released in January with Catalyst 12.1, but full support wasn't available until Catalyst 12.3. When the reviewing outlets got their hands on it they ran it with the 12.1 drivers which is fully understandable because those were the ones available at the time. Since the drivers lacked full support, the benchmarks showed reasonable gains over the old HD 6970 and only marginal gains over the long-time flagship GTX 580.

When the 680 came out, the reviewers were were all too eager to see how it stacked up against the 7970. All too eager in fact that they didn't even bother to rerun the 7970 benchmarks with the new drivers, they just slapped the 680 benchmarks beside their existing 7970 benchmarks and yelled "first!".

Similarly, some reviewing outlets run benchmarks with the lowest common denominator as far as settings go. Most outlets don't test Metro 2033 with the Depth of Field filter turned on. Metro's DoF filter is Direct Compute based rather than shader based. This means that it runs exceptionally well on AMD cards but crushes NVidia's Kepler cards.

There's also variance in the set of applications that they benchmark against. A few reviewing outlets have a suite of applications that are almost exclusively TWIMTBP which means NVidia bought the exclusive rights to hand optimize them before they went gold. This means that AMD can't touch the game until it's been released while NVidia has had some time already. Even Tom's Hardware has been criticized for having a degree of bias in this regard.

 

[davemaster84]

Well if it's for drivers the 7970 has been more time out in the market and therefore it's drivers should be in a more advanced state. When they made the 680 review they used the 300.99 drivers , and believe me those weren't good enough, maybe they should re run the benchmarks with the new beta which is been rumored to become the new whql in a few days.

About metro most people radeon users or not recommend to turn off DOF because it adss nothing to graphics quality but it does drop framerate sometimes even a half, so why bother?

What indeed you could say about 7970´s is that they are best suited for either AMD or Intel (apparently better if AMD) and that's something the 680´s still miss, there's a known issue with the 680 SLI nto working on surround mode on 990fx boards, so yeah that's an advantage for the radeons.

 

[Pinhedd]

Well if it's for drivers the 7970 has been more time out in the market and therefore it's drivers should be in a more advanced state. When they made the 680 review they used the 300.99 drivers , and believe me those weren't good enough, maybe they should re run the benchmarks with the new beta which is been rumored to become the new whql in a few days.

I'd be fine with that. When Tom's reviewed the 7970 Ghz edition they ran it with the newest 12.7 beta drivers and praised how well they performed. Fair is fair. Any "new" review should use "new" data.

About metro most people radeon users or not recommend to turn off DOF because it adss nothing to graphics quality but it does drop framerate sometimes even a half, so why bother?

I disagree. I think that it adds a lot of realism to the image quality, specifically whenever what you're focused on is currently trying to eat your face off and/or pump you full of lead. It's a cinematic improvement, and that's what Metro is all about.

What indeed you could say about 7970´s is that they are best suited for either AMD or Intel (apparently better if AMD) and that's something the 680´s still miss, there's a known issue with the 680 SLI nto working on surround mode on 990fx boards, so yeah that's an advantage for the radeons.

This is certainly true. When NVidia was in the chipset business they made some truly awful chipsets, so I'm glad they left that to just AMD and Intel. SLI not working properly on AMD chipsets is no surprise, for the longest time it didn't work on anything but an NVidia chipset. I have only a single large monitor so I can't really compare how Surround/Eyefinity compare to each other but from what I've heard multi-display setups are purely the domain of AMD right now.