Well, I've got an EVGA GTX 680 on the way. NewEgg had them in stock for about 5 minutes tonight. It's going to be replacing my GTX 480.

I'm mainly concerned with alleviating the heat and noise issues while maintaining comfortable framerates at 2560x1600. Will see how it goes.

Great catch. Looking forward to your "findings"

Congrats shan2! what he said +1

BTW, if you could try Heaven 2.5 or 3.0 benchmark at "2.5 default settings" (DX11, Shaders High, Tessellation Normal, Anisotropy 4, Anti-aliasing Off, full-screen, your monitor resolution, and 1920x1080 for more direct comparison) that would provide a good comparison that the rest of us could run on our systems.

Moreover it would allow 1-to-1 comparison to a couple years of on-line GPU test results that used Heaven 2.5 benchmark at default settings. Heaven 3.0 seems identical to 2.5 but with more options and different default settings (which is why I requested 2.5 defaults even if using 3.0).

The main numbers to report would be the score and average FPS (minimum FPS would be important, but Heaven does not calculate that in a meaningful way).

Thanks for considering it.

Also, how much did it cost -- pricing rumors varied from $500 to $560 (can't find it on Newegg, yet -- came and went).

GTX vs 7970/7950 Black Editions:


Supposedly all default settings, my 7950 gets better scores than some of their 7970 scores.

beats 7970 in 3dmarks (232 pts higher, 3099 total),

beats 7970 Dirt Bench (186 fr/sec vs 143 fr/sec),

Loses to 7970 in Metro 2033 42 fr/ps vs 45 fr/ps

Loses to 7970 in TessMark temps. (58^C vs 78^C)

beats 7970 in 3dmark Vantage, 18785 pts vs 18556

beats 7970 in heaven 3.0, 115.1 fps vs 84.5 fps

beats 7970 in BF3, 70 fps vs 65

Cool thanks for sharing that, been looking forward to this Kepler embargo lifting day for a long while. Good to see the hardware finally and also the confirmation of 3+ monitor surround mode on a single card.

The Heaven 3.0 performance is pretty decent comparing to other cards (pulled from that slide):
67.9 GTX 570
76.1 GTX 560Ti/448OC (mine)
80.3 GTX 580
115.1 GTX 680
67.5 HD 7870
83.4 HD 7950
84.5 HD 7970

I think Heaven represents game performance pretty well, and that 40FPS jump compared to my current card is pretty nice.

But the thing is: the large performance gap is only in some games and benchmarks (conveniently the ones everyone is using lol)

how much of that gap is really raw render speed power of the GPU and how much of it is speed made up by using FXAA instead of MSAA. not everygame supports FXAA.

but it doess look like the 680 rename is a Beast.

but im looking at the Temps and Power Draws in other reviews, if this is the 670 GK1xx, then I think we might not actually see the true 680 chip unless its with water or extreme aftermarket cooling.


To get better GPU Performance results, they need to run the benchmarks w/ FXAA OFF (AA Off period) and Turbo OFF.

like i said, I can get my 7950 to bench above what they have for the 7970 BE.

560ti/448 will make a nice PhysX Card :p

Good question, he doesn't mention on this video how he had the NV driver configured, hopefully the more thorough apples to apples 680 reviews will be coming today so we can tell whether the numbers here are reliable comparison.

But I think even so, if these numbers are representative of the FPS you get during a game and at similar visual quality with FXAA instead of MSAA then that is still a huge jump in real world performance IMHO, one reason I like Heaven is the performance and quality results I've seen with it as I test OC settings seem to match pretty closely what I see in sims.

Also I was not impressed with the max temp of 78c which is much higher than my current card (64c) or the ATI cards (59c)... for people who SLI that may be a big concern especially if the MB slots are close together.

Can't wait to see the reviews, as a non-partial NV/AMD fan this is a great new technology day just like the 7970 release day was

UPDATE:
Good point on some games not supporting FXAA, hopefully full reviews will show whether it was being used or not, and also compare 680 boosted to 7970 OCed