Our next benchmark is SmallLuxGPU, the GPU ray tracing branch of the open source LuxRender renderer. It’s not by much, mind you, but in this case the GTX 680 for all of its functional units and its core clock advantage doesn’t have the compute performance to stand toe-to-toe with the GTX 580.Īt first glance our initial assumptions would appear to be right: Kepler’s scheduler changes have weakened its compute performance relative to Fermi. AMD’s shift to GCN has rocketed them to the top of our Civ V Compute benchmark, meanwhile the reality is that in what’s probably the most realistic DirectCompute benchmark we have has the GTX 680 losing to the GTX 580, never mind the 7970. Remember when NVIDIA used to sweep AMD in Civ V Compute? Times have certainly changed. Note that this is a DX11 DirectCompute benchmark. Civ V includes a sub-benchmark that exclusively tests the speed of their texture decompression algorithm by repeatedly decompressing the textures required for one of the game’s leader scenes. Our first compute benchmark comes from Civilization V, which uses DirectCompute to decompress textures on the fly. NVIDIA has made it clear that they are focusing first and foremost on gaming performance with GTX 680, and in the process are deemphasizing compute performance. As we mentioned in our discussion on the Kepler architecture, GK104’s improvements seem to be compute neutral at best, and harmful to compute performance at worst. For those who wonder why we didn’t just downclock the Nvidia cards to stock speeds, well we could have done that but the Turbo boosting baked into Kepler cards means no two cards will perform the same even when clocked at the same speed.As always our final set of benchmarks is a look at compute performance. In short, Nvidia’s results have a 10%~ or more advantage than the AMD ones due to the factory overclocked cards tested. This was not done intentionally to favour Nvidia but these were the only non-reference cards we had to hand, and we only use non-reference cards as we want to avoid inconsistencies associated with thermal throttling that AMD and Nvidia cards both experience.
For the AMD tests we used two cards that were close to, if not at, stock speeds. Why? Because for our Nvidia tests we used Gigabyte’s GHz Edition GTX 780 Ti and MSI’s Lightning Edition GTX 680, both of these are heavily overclocked Nvidia cards out of the box. One thing I would like to note before we dive into the results is that you shouldn’t use these results to compare the GTX 680 to the HD 7970, or the R9 290X to the GTX 780 Ti.
#NVIDIA GTX 680 COMPARE DRIVER#
If you read our equivalent AMD driver analysis you will see that the story with the HD 7970 and R9 290X is nearly identical. This means the GTX 680 will show greater performance improvements compared to the GTX 780 Ti. Of course with the GTX 780 Ti being based on the same Kepler 28nm architecture as the GTX 680 by the time the GTX 780 Ti was released many of the largest performance optimisations had already been made for the Kepler architecture.
This means that the GTX 680 has had 2.5 years of driver updates while the GTX 780 Ti hasn’t even had a year yet. The story with Nvidia is a similar one to AMD, both the flagships of last two generations are based on the same microarchitecture which is, in Nvidia’s case, 28nm Kepler. The latest driver package for both these Nvidia graphics cards is 340.52. We used the 331.65 package since this supports the GTX 780 Ti and is identical to the unavailable 331.70 package. The GTX 780 Ti launched on the 7th of November 2013 with the special press driver package 331.70, although this was identical to the 331.65 package except with “official” GTX 780 Ti support. At launch the Nvidia GTX 680 shipped with Nvidia Forceware 301.10 drivers. Nvidia’s GTX 680 launched on March 22nd 2012, exactly four months after AMD’s HD 7970 launched.
#NVIDIA GTX 680 COMPARE DRIVERS#
This means for both graphics cards we will be testing two scenarios on identical test systems, the first scenario is with the drivers the graphics cards shipped with at launch and the second is the most current driver release for the graphics cards at the time of doing the testing.
#NVIDIA GTX 680 COMPARE SERIES#
We will be taking Nvidia’s last two GTX series flagships, the GTX 680 for the GTX 600 series and the GTX 780 Ti for the GTX 700 series, and comparing their launch drivers to the current latest drivers. Now that we’ve done AMD it is of course time to do the same for Nvidia.
We compared each flagship card’s launch drivers to the latest drivers and calculated the improvements in a variety of games and benchmarks. Just over a month ago we published our AMD driver analysis article looking at the progress two generations of AMD flagship GPUs, the HD 7970 and R9 290X, had made with driver updates.
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