GeForce GTX 690 Review: Testing Nvidia's Sexiest Graphics Card

Benchmark Results: Sandra 2012 And LuxMark 2.0

Unfortunately, Nvidia’s 301.33 driver appears to break support for the OpenCL General Purpose Bandwidth and Cryptography tests, which previously worked just fine. I think it’s pretty clear, though, that the company intends these as gaming cards and hopes to separate out its compute-oriented products.

That’s good news for AMD, since its GCN-based Radeon HD 7000-series boards seem well-suited to both 3D and compute applications.

As a case in point, LuxMark 2.0 shows the Nvidia cards all underperforming current- and last-gen AMD boards, with the Radeon HD 7970 in CrossFire throwing down huge sample/sec results.

Chris Angelini is an Editor Emeritus at Tom's Hardware US. He edits hardware reviews and covers high-profile CPU and GPU launches.