The first "proper" Kepler news Fri 17th Feb?

ALXAndy · 17 Mar 2012 at 15:14

http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/26394-geforce-gtx-680-pictured

Officially 1006mhz apparently.

se_vietboi · 17 Mar 2012 at 15:15

AMD still has Tahiti which looks to be same or faster than this benched 680.

modez · 17 Mar 2012 at 15:18

I think the graphic card technology has reached its point and it is not going to get any better. Baring in mind the faster they go they got hotter and create a lot of problems. I would say spending £400 on a graphic card every 6 months is a total waste of money. All the manufacturers should realise that the limitation has reached the target for the chipset. There is no point to keep going on making these graphic cards and keep changing them. The old ones still serve their purpose.

thezakarum · 17 Mar 2012 at 15:18

se_vietboi said:
AMD still has Tahiti which looks to be same or faster than this benched 680.

Yeah, hovering around £420 for a reference design card.

I guess we're waiting to see the pricing on the gtx680.

The prices of the 7970 may or may not change.

Gregster · 17 Mar 2012 at 15:20

Mal X said:
they're getting their arses kicked that's why, i mean look at that GTX 590...a disaster or what!

this new card will be way too expensive and you'll have to be a bit crazy to buy it if the 7970/ 7950 drop in prices.... this card is too late coming out, because the others are starting to drop in price already

Mal X said:
after all, if i was after muscle right now i'd get the GTX 590.... therefore the additional 8 fps doesn't bother me much, it's the price only....... this new Nvidia card might be seen as another GTX 590, too expensive and a waste of time.

This new card is only interesting if it's cheap and way more powerful than the competition, which it definitely wont be.... Nvidia look ****ed to me

lmao I don't think you know what you want Mal :confused:

Let the official benches and Gibbo bench it and then decide. Don't be a hater on something that has nothing official released yet. We need to see how it Overclocks also, to then be able to compare it to the 7970 and see how pricing is.

RavenXXX2 · 17 Mar 2012 at 15:25

If this 680 comes in at 450 and above and clocks like a lemon then I'm gonna grab that £300 Asus 7950 doing the rounds. If the official reviews confirm what we have already seen then a 7950 at 1050 core should be a good match for a 680. You get 3GB of ram opposed to 2GB with 680, great value all things considered.

Gregster · 17 Mar 2012 at 15:25

modez said:
I think the graphic card technology has reached its point and it is not going to get any better. Baring in mind the faster they go they got hotter and create a lot of problems. I would say spending £400 on a graphic card every 6 months is a total waste of money. All the manufacturers should realise that the limitation has reached the target for the chipset. There is no point to keep going on making these graphic cards and keep changing them. The old ones still serve their purpose.

Moore's Law....

Moore's law is a rule of thumb in the history of computing hardware whereby the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The period often quoted as "18 months" is due to Intel executive David House, who predicted that period for a doubling in chip performance (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and their being faster).

This so far as I can tell is the case. (Duff-Man will correct me if I am wrong).

As gfx get better the demands for faster GPU's come with it. That samaritan demo is a showcase and will also be something I very much expect to see 'as the norm' for GFX soon.

Maybe I am wishfull thinking but I would bet that kind of advancement, is not far away.

thezakarum · 17 Mar 2012 at 15:26

Is it just me or does Mal make any sense? :confused:

thezakarum · 17 Mar 2012 at 15:29

RavenXXX2 said:
If this 680 comes in at 450 and above and clocks like a lemon then I'm gonna grab that £300 Asus 7950 doing the rounds. If the official reviews confirm what we have already seen then a 7950 at 1050 core should be a good match for a 680. You get 3GB of ram opposed to 2GB with 680, great value all things considered.

Exactly sad to say, not long now though.

Just 6 days to go.

And 5 for official benchmark/reviews.

ALXAndy · 17 Mar 2012 at 15:30

CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
I would still wait until the GTX680 reviews are out to make a final judgement though. For instance we don't know if the GTX670 will be simply an underclocked GTX680(or not). It could explain all the noise about the magic BIOS.

Without doing it exactly...

If the card was initially going to be 700 or so mhz then an extra 300mhz is about 40% of that on top. Infact, it's pretty much bang on 40%.

The problem is we will never have exact solid answers to it because as soon as it launches all of that stuff will become a distant memory. The only people who could literally explain it properly would be Nvidia and I can't see them explaining how they managed to overclock a mid ranged part so that they could charge lots of money for it.

Apparently according to Fudzilla the card will supposedly officially be 1006 mhz stock clock with the ability to up that by around 50mhz for its "turbo boost" mode. What does make me stop and think though is this...

How the heck is 50mhz going to make a difference over 1006 mhz? that's about a 5% clock boost, which is pretty pathetic at best.

The only reasons I can think of for that are that the card is already very close to its limits, or, it is very close to its limits so they needed to leave at least a tiny fraction of headroom for the overclocking crowd.

However, many other questions remain unanswered. Can that turbo boost thing be disabled to get a stable overclock? If not it's far from ideal. Last thing you need when you overclock the card is it then adding more on top of that making it unstable.

xsistor · 17 Mar 2012 at 15:33

gregster said:
Moore's Law....

Moore's law is a rule of thumb in the history of computing hardware whereby the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The period often quoted as "18 months" is due to Intel executive David House, who predicted that period for a doubling in chip performance (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and their being faster).

This so far as I can tell is the case. (Duff-Man will correct me if I am wrong).

As gfx get better the demands for faster GPU's come with it. That samaritan demo is a showcase and will also be something I very much expect to see 'as the norm' for GFX soon.

Maybe I am wishfull thinking but I would bet that kind of advancement, is not far away.

The doubling is for number of transistors you can pack into an area. But this does not always translate to doubling of performance. However, it can roughly double for computational problems that are easily parallelizable, which, luckily, is the case with most of the things the GPU does.

With CPU performance, for example, this never translates into a doubling of performance because the type of computational problems CPUs spend most of their time doing is not often parallelizable.

thezakarum · 17 Mar 2012 at 15:36

ALXAndy said:
How the heck is 50mhz going to make a difference over 1006 mhz? that's about a 5% clock boost, which is pretty pathetic at best.

The only reasons I can think of for that are that the card is already very close to its limits, or, it is very close to its limits so they needed to leave at least a tiny fraction of headroom for the overclocking crowd.

Preeeetty sure I said that a few pages back.

Don't know why we're still banging on about the same things.

All we can do is wait, and chill.

Gregster · 17 Mar 2012 at 15:38

xsistor said:
The doubling is for number of transistors you can pack into an area. But this does not always translate to doubling of performance. However, it can roughly double for computational problems that are easily parallelizable, which, luckily, is the case with most of the things the GPU does.

With CPU performance, for example, this never translates into a doubling of performance because the type of computational problems CPUs spend most of their time doing is not often parallelizable.

I wasn't far away then

Thanks for clearing that up Xsistor.

psychodil · 17 Mar 2012 at 15:44

Looks an okay card to me, power consumption is impressive. A 7970 at 1000mhz would probably match it though. Will wait to see overclocking potential.

tommybhoy · 17 Mar 2012 at 15:54

I'm running out of popcorn!

Funniest thread in ages!

rare · 17 Mar 2012 at 15:57

I think we might end up in a situation where both cards are able to perform very closely. Still think the 7970 will have a better shot at higher resolutions due to its extra ram and bandwidth.

Getting fed up waiting for the reviews!! It feels like its been the longest drawn out release in GPU history

baldmonk · 17 Mar 2012 at 16:01

the funny thing is new cards are still coming out and charging a arm and leg but the performance increases are not matching the prices,the performance could double and we would not need it simply because of games consoles,we are currently in the longest life cycle of a console generation so games are getting only marginaly better and most games are being ported over to pc anyway.The point is why spend 500 pounds on a card this year to get a extra 10 fps and then find out there is a jump in quality from say xbox to 360 just around the corner and find out that card now struggles to match a console,it happens everytime but this time its differant because of the length of time its taking to go next gen.the card companies know its a waste of time and money producing amazing cards with twice the performance over the last ones because consoles are holding pc gaming back so to get your money they make them run cooler,more efficient,consume less power with a low increase in performance knowing they will sell and always will because most pc gamers are hardcore gamers and cant stand not having the newest and best products available and use the lower power,heat etc etc to justify there purchase. all just my opinion

muon · 17 Mar 2012 at 16:03

7950/7970 people are happy then as they have been using their cards for 2 months without paying over the odds.

The idle power consumption differnce looks pretty big, so if like me you leave your PC on pretty much 24/7 that may add up (but if you have a lot of gaming hours it might cancel out).

rare · 17 Mar 2012 at 16:03

Always been the case with GPU's though really. What will be interesting will be to see what GPU's are in the next round of consoles as this will give a good indication to what you will need to play the next round of games for a few years.

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 17 Mar 2012 at 16:12

Some noise about the performance of the GTX680:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums...orce-GTX-780&p=5070158&viewfull=1#post5070158

"GTX 680 29fps in Heaven Benchmark in Surround.
HD 7970 22fps in Eyefinity.
GTX 590 27fps in Surround."

Possible hint about overclocking performance:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums...orce-GTX-780&p=5070172&viewfull=1#post5070172

There has been a previous rumour about the GTX680 hitting 1.4GHZ IIRC.

Having said that I had another thought. Why didn't AMD have a Turbo Boost like function for the HD7900 series?? In fact they already do this for one of their CPUs,ie, the E450 which has a similar function for the IGP.

Edit!!

The GTX680 is now the surround MASTER.