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| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by Olin Coles | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Thursday, 03 May 2012 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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DX11: Unigine Heaven 3.0The Unigine Heaven 2.1 benchmark is a free publicly available tool that grants the power to unleash the graphics capabilities in DirectX-11 for Windows 7 or updated Vista Operating Systems. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. With the interactive mode, emerging experience of exploring the intricate world is within reach. Through its advanced renderer, Unigine is one of the first to set precedence in showcasing the art assets with tessellation, bringing compelling visual finesse, utilizing the technology to the full extend and exhibiting the possibilities of enriching 3D gaming. The distinguishing feature in the Unigine Heaven benchmark is a hardware tessellation that is a scalable technology aimed for automatic subdivision of polygons into smaller and finer pieces, so that developers can gain a more detailed look of their games almost free of charge in terms of performance. Thanks to this procedure, the elaboration of the rendered image finally approaches the boundary of veridical visual perception: the virtual reality transcends conjured by your hand. Although Heaven-2.1 was recently released and used for our DirectX-11 tests, the benchmark results were extremely close to those obtained with Heaven-1.0 testing. Since only DX11-compliant video cards will properly test on the Heaven benchmark, only those products that meet the requirements have been included.
Heaven Benchmark Test Results
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Comments
GTX 680s in SLI completely destroy a single 690.
saves you space on you motherboard.
price of 2x gtx 680 is same as 1x gtx 690.
gtx 680 2x power consumption.
SLi/crossfire, 2x gpu setup delays because they need to communicate between each other first before making computations
everyone knows that SLi or crossfiring 2 gpu doesnt give you 2 times performance. some games doesnt fully support SLi usually you have to wait for game updates. You also need to wait gpu driver updates to make sli/crossfire work efficiently on new games especially on new release gpu cards
which by the way an sli of gtx680 needs to be plugged in two pcie which in many cases causes bottleneck because some mobo has diffrent pcie gen2, gen3 and sometimes even if on 2x pcie gen3 sli some mobo will run it as gen2 which is the bottle.. tooo much hassle..
a single gtx690 = on a single pcie running at gen3
I'll buy a 690, and in less than a year I'll buy one to SLI for half the price. They've already stated that it'll clock over 1,100 on stock cooling, so as far as you being "really sure", i'm not sure what you're smoking.
I had the 7950 gx2 back in the day and it ran as well as the 8800, and it was cheaper, minus dx10. A couple months later I bought another for half the price because i HAD ROOM. It lasted another 3-4 years, and still kicked ass.
If you're going to buy anything and they're the same price, why would you buy 2 that have less performance, instead of one at the same price using the same chips and more room to expand?
I'm not sure of your reasoning on this, it makes no sense.
And don't correct me on price, that is the price for two, actually useful 680's.
I´ve read an article about GeForce GTX 680 3-way SLI an that didnt impress me much... i think an 690 or an 2-way SLI of 680 is a gamers dream for the next time. Maybe NVIDIA has some driver work to do for more power with more cards, dunno....
But hey maybe they will benchmark an GTX 690 Quad SLI Pack here.... that would be more than great....
Would the cpu hold the GTX690 or the GTX680 back too much to be worth the investment, or will a GTX680 or GTX690 be able to deliver nevertheless?
You have somewhat put my worries to rest.
I have been thinking of upgrading since GTA V was announced. My GTX 295 can handle all current demanding games with surprising ease, but it is at its limits when I want to push the GTA IV graphics. I hope the GTA V engine is better optimized for PC.
I will try to hold back my eagerness to buy a new video card until I feel it is really necessary.
And I didn't see the power usage idle/load on power chart.
This isn't a motherboard review, so there's no point in testing PCI-E 2 vs 3. If someone has $1000 to burn on a video card, they're not using it on old hardware.
Seriously, good stuff, but did I miss the usual scoring in the conclusion section or is it just not present?
Sure, if you're running a multiple monitor setup, higher FPS is what you want, but STILL, dual 680s in SLI is way better than a single 690.
Also, I disagree that SLI 680s is better than one GTX 690. It's your money, so buy what you want, but there's no 'right' answer.
Do you know what the "p" in terms like "720p" actually stands for?
So I am afraid to buy Radeon now.
I have tried a few generations of Nvidia cards and all my driver problems have gone away.
So you can see why I would be hard pressed to ever go back to the video cards that gave me so much trouble.
I am not saying I will never ever try an AMD card again, But at the moment I decline.