GTX 680 Specs + Benchmarks


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i bought my 5850 almost a year ago for 125 bucks. i oc'ed it and it performs similar to 6890. there is still nothing out there that I can REMOTELY justify upgrading to.

Indeed. My Q8200 (which is OCd to 2.8 GHz) is more of a bottleneck than my OCd 5850 in most games.

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Do you have a 30" monitor and play games with a 2560 x1600 resolution? Or have you ever experienced playing games like this on another person's computer? Games at this resolution are not pixelated or jagged. Unless you were letting a GPU upscale a game that did not support this resolution the image will look the same as 1920x1080.

I have a 27" iMac (which is the 16:9 2560x1440) and have gamed on it. Depending on the GPU you are running, you may have to scale back on the AA to get decent framerates. At that resolution, I'll grant you that it's harder to see the pixelation/jaggedness, but that's purely because of the pixel density, not because of the graphics power. That doesn't mean it's not there.

Thirty inch monitors have been out for a while now and plenty of people own them and game with one. So I feel that these state of the art top leading graphic cards should be able to push a game at a resolution of 2560x1600. I remember when graphic cards could barely push a game at the resolutions that were the norm at the time. Since then graphic cards have come a long way and so have monitors. I know that the games have come a long way too. My point is why is a graphics card always behind. The number one card seems like it can never push a certain game to the max, or resolution, or something. You think that it would be able to do anything the most recent game and hardware allow and a decent performance. That is why I am not impressed.

The problem isn't the cards necessarily. Most cards of the last generation have enough raw power to push that resolution without an issue. The problem lies in the pipeline between the GPU and the display, i.e. the card's drivers, the game code, how well optimized the game code is, what features the engine supports and the game is using, etc. Raw resolution with good AA at 2560x1600 is easy for most mid-high end GPUs. However, you throw things in like tesselation, physics, transparency, HDR and other lighting effects and the resources the GPU has available for raw resolution/AA are lowered because of the demands of these other technologies.

I'm not trying to disagree with you - given the choice, I'd game on a 27-30" monitor with all the settings cranked. The reality is that because of these other effects and technologies games use, it's a balance between resolution and image quality, not 100% of both.

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I agree it depends on the game and hardware. It would be nice if BF3 was more efficient. I suppose the 30" monitors never hit main stream. When I bought mine 2 to 3 years ago they seemed to be getting more popularity. Of course it cost 1100 then. At the time there was over a dozen on Newegg and Newegg did not carry everthing that was being sold. Since then the market turned and the number of 30" monitors has decreased. I looked on Newegg the other day and there are only two now.

My monitor is the LG W3000H. It has a 5 ms response time. It would be nice if it was 2 ms but it is good enough for gaming. Plus it is an IPS panel. It would be awesome if it was 2 ms and LED back lit. Oh well. It is good enough for me though

I guess if I want 60 fps in the top games I will just have to do crossfire or sli. Or I can learn to live with a few less fps. I really do love 2560 x1600 because the map does not take up so much of the screen.

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You can't notice anymore fluidity than that

You haven't tried moving your mouse reasonably fast in a first person shooter then. Use a 120hz monitor with a fast (quake or w/e) first person shooter running at 120 fps or some higher multiple for a day, then go back to a 60hz monitor at 60fps; you won't want to play on the 60hz anymore.

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i bought my 5850 almost a year ago for 125 bucks. i oc'ed it and it performs similar to 6890. there is still nothing out there that I can REMOTELY justify upgrading to.

The same deal here. I paid ?200 for my 5850 just after they were released and it's still going pretty strong @1920x1200. My previous card was an 8800GTS 640mb and I think the next card in-line worthy of the same price/performance upgrade will be either the 7850 or 7870 - I'm thinking the latter will be a better deal for around the ?240 mark as once overclocked it's looking like a great performer.

No doubt it'll be the usual straight swap from $ to ? so something like the GTX680 or 7970 at near double the price of a 7870 is not enough performance to justify the price imo.

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If yea want that size of screen for gaming without problems yea have to go high end everything to prevent bottle necking. For example X79 chipset platform and dual gpu pretty much to sum it up, you have to factor in for all related issues and build a system that can meet or exceed what you want to do. You cant just build a low to mid end system or have a mid end system and expect to run it at that high of settings. Important to note about the benchmarks they are based off what people use on a daily basis not what extreme gamers and enterprise users would use.

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