Reviews - GeForce GTX 680 vs. Radeon HD 7970 at same clocks

[HEXUS]

So who was the bragging rights once the frequency advantage is stripped out?

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[Phage]

Nice review. This is why I stay at Hexus so much.

[dfour]

Fantastic article I think AMD might have gone to heavy with the compute power on the top level chips while nvidia have gone the other way. Think this means nvidia will also win the duel crown this time round unless AMD can pull something big out of the bag.

[warejon9]

This is quite interesting, as for AMD this is a new arch, whereas Nvidia it is modification of fermi. If you look back at where the 6000 series came from, this new arch from AMD could hold a lot of promise. I'm still amazed at the power draw figures for the Nvidia card, certainly well done by them.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It will be interesting if AMD will be able to boost Tahiti somewhat more,in the next few months. There has some been some vague noise about them raising the default clockspeeds somewhat:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost...97&postcount=1

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33987782

OTH,the dual GK104 is going to be less TDP constrained than the dual Tahiti card,so should be faster too.

[Terbinator]

They'd have to raise it over 100MHz to performance competitive alone. I'm not saying this isn't doable, we know they're highly-clockable (under-clocked?) chips and they did 100MHz on the 4890 but it would be a bit 'meh' if they clocked them higher and cost more to boot - whilst being slower.

[Phage]

100Mhz would no problem at all. I run mine at +125Mhz as standard and with the cooler It's only hitting 65C.

[Terbinator]

100Mhz would no problem at all. I run mine at +125Mhz as standard and with the cooler It's only hitting 65C.

I know, see above.

I think they'll let the 7970 bleed out and replace it with the 7980. That way it won't look as 'expensive' and there appears to be a reason to keep the price gap to the 7950. Lastly, the apparent competitive nature against a stock GTX 680 (at GHz speeds) means that they can still get away with the '3GB VRAM' marketing.

[Djini]

Over clocking the ATI cards will generate more power consumption. nvidia are providing this computational speed with less power and (although controllable) more noise.

[kalniel]

Over clocking the ATI cards will generate more power consumption. nvidia are providing this computational speed with less power and (although controllable) more noise.

!

Be careful talking about computational speed The GTX680 is much slower at compute than the 7970 is, however, it's faster for gaming

[13thmonkey]

!

Be careful talking about computational speed The GTX680 is much slower at compute than the 7970 is, however, it's faster for gaming

Thats an artificial limit though isn't it?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Thats an artificial limit though isn't it?

Nope. It was the case with the GTX480 and GTX580 though.

[Boomstick777]

Does anybody know why that although technically the 7970 has better specs and way better GPU compute performance, that the GTX 680 performs better in games? Tis a bit weird lol.

Looking forward to non reference 680's soon!

[watercooled]

Not sure if you actually want an answer to that since most of your posts boil down to 'Nvidia rulezzz' 'AMD doesn't...'.

But, you never, ever compare GPUs based on specs, you're looking at two very different architectures so, even though these two perform similarly at the same clocks, you should never compare clock speed/shaders/ROPs/etc. The ONLY time you may get something useful out of that is comparing exactly the same die running at different clocks. You can't even compare the amount of shaders/ROPS on the same architecture because you don't know where the bottleneck is - removing a load of shaders would lead you to believe lower performance, but it's not always the case, if the card is fronend limited in a lot of games, like the 7970 for instance.

And that in itself is part of the reason; the 7970 is a compute monster and in most shader-limited apps, the 680 won't touch it (the 680 falls behind even the 580 in most tests). This is also likely why the 7870 performs so similar to the 7950 in some less shader bound games, they share a frontend but the 7870 is clocked higher than the 7950.