In an email shared with AnandTech, the CEO of Nvidia took the time out of his busy day to thank the employees for their efforts over the past three years to bring Kepler to the "shelves around the world!". It reads:
----Original Message----- From: Jensen H Huang Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 9:48 AM To: Employees Subject: Kepler Rising Today, the first Kepler - GTX 680 - is on shelves around the world! Three years in the making. The endeavor of a thousand of the world's best engineers. One vision - build a revolutionary GPU and make a giant leap in efficient-performance. Achieving efficient-performance, great performance while consuming the least possible energy, required us to change our entire design approach. Close collaboration between architecture-design-VLSI-software-devtech-systems, intense scrutiny on where energy is spent, and inventions at every level were necessary. The results are fantastic as you will see in the reviews. Kepler also cultivated a passion for craftsmanship - nothing wasted, everything put together with care - with a goal of creating an exquisite product that works wonderfully. Let's continue to raise the bar and establish extraordinary craftsmanship as a hallmark of our company. Today is just the beginning of Kepler. Because of its super energy-efficient architecture, we will extend GPUs into datacenters, to super thin notebooks, to superphones. Not to mention bring joy and delight to millions of gamers around the world. I want to thank all that gave your heart and soul to create Kepler. You've created something wonderful. Congratulations everyone!Jensen
To quote Chris Angelini, the "GeForce GTX 680 is now the fastest single-GPU graphics card, and not by a margin that leaves room to hem or haw. Making matters worse for AMD, the GTX 680 is priced right between its Radeon HD 7970 and 7950. Providing that Nvidia’s launch price sticks, both Radeon HD 7900s need to be significantly less expensive in order to compete." Read our full GTX 680 review here.