Benchmark Results: Sandra 2012
If you need any evidence that GK104 was originally intended to fill the same “Hunter” role that the GeForce GTX 460 originally targeted, this is it.
Although the GK104 GPU’s increased shader count has a positive impact on 32-bit floating-point math, drastically outperforming the GeForce GTX 590, it’s unable to catch AMD’s Radeon HD 7950, 6990, or 7970.
Moreover, Nvidia limits 64-bit double-precision math to 1/24 of single-precision, protecting its more compute-oriented cards from being displaced by purpose-built gamer boards. The result is that GeForce GTX 680 underperforms GeForce GTX 590, 580 and to a much direr degree, the three competing boards from AMD.
AMD’s GCN architecture absolutely dominates this benchmark, forming a class entirely separate from the GeForce GTX 680 or Radeon HD 6990, which trade blows.
Using Nvidia’s latest 296.10 driver (and several earlier versions), the GeForce GTX 590 and 580 cannot complete this test using the OpenCL or DirectCompute paths.
