How Fast Is The GeForce GTX 680?

Needless to say, NVIDIA is declaring the GeForce GTX 680 the world's fastest GPU. According to the following benchmark results, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 is, on average, about 20% faster than the AMD Radeon HD 7970.

NVIDIA also boasts that the GeForce GTX 680 is more than 4x faster than the Radeon HD 7970 in tessellation. However, that is only true if you are rendering commercial-grade 3D movies with a really high expansion factor. As the following slide shows, the GeForce GTX 680 is about 10-15% slower than the Radeon HD 7970 in tesselation when the expansion factor is 9 or less, and is on equal footing with an expansion factor of 10. It only shows a marked (relative) improvement in tessellation speed at higher expansion factors, which is really of no concern to the gamer.

That said, performance isn't everything Kepler is about. As we pointed out earlier, NVIDIA is gunning for greater efficiency - performance per watt, in other words. Let's take a look at how much more efficient the GeForce GTX 680 is.

When seen from the performance per watt perspective, the GeForce GTX 680 looks even better compared to the Radeon HD 7970, boasting about 32% greater efficiency.

When compared against its predecessor though, the GeForce GTX 680 looks very impressive, with an average boost of about 46% in performance per watt. This is nowhere near 2x the efficiency level that NVIDIA is claiming for Kepler but it is a huge improvement nevertheless.

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