nVidia GTX 680: The world's fastest GPU benchmark results released!

nVIDIA's next-gen GPUs took a lot of time to arrive, but the first of the Kepler crew is finally available in stores and its 28nm silicon is just dying to show off what it can do. You may be wondering what the 2GB GeForce GTX 680 brings to the gaming table, and whether it'll put an end to AMD's free run at the top of the food chain. Well, NVIDIA now claims it has "the fastest GPU in the world", with both lower power consumption and a 10-40 percent performance advantage over AMD's single-GPU rival, the Radeon HD 7970, at a full-hd resolution. Bluff or reality? Ultimately, all results come from independent benchmarks (coming soon in our review round-up), but in the meantime we need to look at NVIDIA's new architecture for clues.

First, the GTX 680 has a GPU Boost feature that automatically increases the clock speed when the GPU isn't fully taxed. You see, GPUs are designed with a thermal power limit (TPL), and they often operate well beneath that limit - the new boost technology simply leverages that TPL headroom to increase the clock speed, while still keeping the card running within its tolerances. (Picture Cred. Engadget)

NVIDIA no longer has to factory-set its cards to a fixed clock speed that will work in all enviroments. For example, the GTX 680 has a base clock speed of 1GHz, but GPU Boost can increase that by 10 percent when needed, while packaged overclocking utilities will let you notch up the clock / voltage curve even further to readily achieve 1.2GHz, so long as your over-sized fans or water pipes are doing their job. To a certain degree, this amount of speed is useless. You will only be using this much in multi- monitor setups.


I hope my readers are enjoying the longer posts I am putting out, I have been able to do so due to an injury that has left me bed-ridden.


Thanks,


Magikaltech


source:engadget.com