EVE General Discussion

Nothing to see here.

The GTX680 is a good card, and I will be picking one up shortly, but this graph is utter garbage. The methods used to get those numbers are dubious at best and don't reflect the real-world difference between the cards. I would recommend a site like HardOCP for a more objective review.

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And also ask some of these guys

"nvidia kernel driver stopped responding"

lolololololololololololololololol.....

nvidia drivers these days are ****, would never buy from nvidia again after experiencing this issue with 3 generations of nvidia cards, on 2 separate operating systems(XP64 & Win7 Pro) and countless driver versions.

The biggest bottleneck for PC games right now is the desire of game manufacturers to publish games on consoles. In my opinion, if you run everything fast enough right now, you probably don't really need to upgrade for another year and a half when the new consoles start to arrive. I wouldn't do anything before Windows 8 either.

Yeah overclocking really makes things interesting with these cards. Some people are able to get close to 30% overclocks on the core of the 7970 with some really impressive results. Once the GTX 680 drivers mature and OEM manufacturers start coming out with custom boards/designs we'll start to see what the card is really capable of.

Either way I think ATI needs to drop their price point to remain competitive.

I've set up 680 SLI over the weekend (replacing 580 Tri-SLI). I may make some benchmarks in Eve, as I did with Sandy Bridge, and make a little review of that in a couple days. But first observations (without repeating the stuff on HardOCP, Anand, etc.)

1) GeForce 680 will make no major difference to Eve, as we'd expect. As long as you have a 570 (or equivalent) or upwards, Eve is cpu-limited in fleet engagements. This may change once tessellation arrives - although by then the 680 will be old news anyway ;) If you only play Eve and already have a good card, buy a better cpu or buy better cooling and clock your present one more, etc.

2) Metro 2033 performance was no real improvement over 580 Sli. It's CPU-limited on a single screen, despite what reviews say.

3) Witcher 2 performance with ubersampling is stunning. Simply incredible. The 680 setup has almost doubled my framerate with ubersampling, and you can play that with solid 60+ fps, something previously thought impossible. Also, don't under-estimate ubersampling: the difference in motion, especially on clothing and complex models, is incredible. It's like watching genuine CGI.

4) Serious Sam 3 with SSAA is an improvement over 580 SLi. Shogun 2 / FOTS can be play max'd out without a dip on a 120hz monitor. Nothing as dramatic as Witcher 2 but nice.

5) GPUGPU/compute performance is obviously nothing special. If you're into that scene, stick with 580. The ATI/Nvidia situation has reversed there, with ATi dominating GPU computational tasks.

Default clocks are indeed 1006/1058 boost: http://files.rooksandkings.com/index.php/image/direct/CERvp5ohk6/680clock2.jpg

But I'll play around with overclocking them tomorrow. Even though it's stock, according to EVGA Precision it is hitting 1097mhz in boost in Witcher 2.

TL;DR: If you love SSAA, you'll love 680 SLi. If you don't know what that means, you may want to dig around before spending the money. If you only play Eve, it's money better spent elsewhere unless you have 5Ghz SB or 4.5+Ghz 3960x. Until Tess hits, anyway.