GeForce GTX 680 2 GB Review: Kepler Sends Tahiti On Vacation

Benchmark Results: World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm (DX 11)

We had a couple of folks request benchmarks with the new 64-bit World of Warcraft client, which was released with patch 4.3.3. So, today’s charts represent the latest 64-bit build.

Nvidia tends to do better in WoW—a trend we first observed in World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm--Tom's Performance Guide. This continues more than a year later after many game patches and driver revisions. The GeForce GTX 590 takes first place, followed closely by the GeForce GTX 680 and GTX 580.

Did you notice the Radeon HD 6990 sitting at the bottom of the charts in our first two resolutions? Although its performance without anti-aliasing lands it in last place, two Cayman GPUs give up very little when you apply 8x MSAA. WoW depends heavily on host processor performance. Meanwhile, CrossFire is known to exact more CPU overhead than SLI. Put those two observations together, and AMD’s dual-GPU card lags behind the crowd, but then enjoys the addition of anti-aliasing at very little performance cost.

Of course, once we throttle up to 2560x1600, the graphics load is such that the 6990 springs up behind Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 680 for third place.

Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini is an Editor Emeritus at Tom's Hardware US. He edits hardware reviews and covers high-profile CPU and GPU launches.
  • Hail to the new king.
    Reply
  • borden5
    oh man this's good news for consumer, hope to see a price war soon
    Reply
  • johnners2981
    Damn prices, in europe we have to pay the equivalent of $650-$700 to get one
    Reply
  • outlw6669
    Nice results, this is how the transition to 28nm should be.
    Now we just need prices to start dropping, although significant drops will probably not come until the GK110 is released :/
    Reply
  • Finally we will see prices going down (either way :-) )
    Reply
  • Scotty99
    Its a midrange card, anyone who disagrees is plain wrong. Thats not to say its a bad card, what happened here is nvidia is so far ahead of AMD in tech that the mid range card purposed to fill the 560ti in the lineup actually competed with AMD's flagship. If you dont believe me that is fine, you will see in a couple months when the actual flagship comes out, the ones with the 384 bit interface.
    Reply
  • Chainzsaw
    Wow not too bad. Looks like the 680 is actually cheaper than the 7970 right now, about 50$, and generally beats the 7970, but obviously not at everything.

    Good going Nvidia...
    Reply
  • run the test on the same speeds then lets talk...
    Reply
  • SkyWalker1726
    AMD will certainly Drop the price of the 7xxx series
    Reply
  • rantoc
    2x of thoose ordered and will be delivered tomorrow, will be a nice geeky weekend for sure =)
    Reply