GTX 680 Owners Check-In

[Darren Hodgson]

Originally Posted by ragtag

I had this myself. Was firing up ArmA 2 and i got a **** performance...max 20fps... I noticed that the card was stuck on 2D. It simply refused to go 3D. It only happened once so i didn't think any of it. As you say, a restart fixed it.

I don't think 705 MHz on the core is a 2D speed though as my card seems to drops to 324 MHz core/810 MHz memory then 324 MHz core/324 MHz memory within a few seconds of quitting a game (it seems to drop to 2D speeds much quicker than my GTX 580 did). (Annoyingly though, it was stick at 1,006 MHz if I have a browser open with a Flash video playing)

It's odd that the 705 MHz speed that my card stuck at was the misreported core clock reported in the leaks though, isn't it? It almost makes me wonder if there's a bug? FurtureMark's 3DMark11 for example shows my GTX 680's core clock as 705 MHz in the benchmarks I linked to above yet I'm pretty sure from the results that the card was running waaaaaaaaay above 1,006 MHz during the tests.

I have seen a "driver not responding" error twice when I initially ramped the memory core offset up to +500 MHz but haven't seen a single error or artifact since with my more conservative core and memory overclocks. This card hasn't been out long so it may be that over time others come across this same issue. It may simply be a result of pushing the card beyond its TDP though, even with 132% power set, and not actually a bug per-se.

[WhiteLightning]

Originally Posted by Lavans

Yes sir ^_^
16xS + 4xSGSSAA + FXAA at 2560x1440 = perfection

well tbh i dont really like FXAA lol , havent tested the new one though.
but that sure is one hell of a setting you got there
wish i could turn on sgssaa for skyrim again, but i dont have vram left and no money to upgrade to a 680gtx.

[Birdy62]

Originally Posted by Darren Hodgson

I don't think 705 MHz on the core is a 2D speed though as my card seems to drops to 324 MHz core/810 MHz memory then 324 MHz core/324 MHz memory within a few seconds of quitting a game (it seems to drop to 2D speeds much quicker than my GTX 580 did). (Annoyingly though, it was stick at 1,006 MHz if I have a browser open with a Flash video playing)

It's odd that the 705 MHz speed that my card stuck at was the misreported core clock reported in the leaks though, isn't it? It almost makes me wonder if there's a bug? FurtureMark's 3DMark11 for example shows my GTX 680's core clock as 705 MHz in the benchmarks I linked to above yet I'm pretty sure from the results that the card was running waaaaaaaaay above 1,006 MHz during the tests.

I have seen a "driver not responding" error twice when I initially ramped the memory core offset up to +500 MHz but haven't seen a single error or artifact since with my more conservative core and memory overclocks. This card hasn't been out long so it may be that over time others come across this same issue. It may simply be a result of pushing the card beyond its TDP though, even with 132% power set, and not actually a bug per-se.

Have the same problem with my Asus 680 GTX. MSI Afterburner 2.0.1 show 706 mhz on load and 324 on idle. Have the same numbers with the last Nvidia Inspector. But the card is performing normally and the benchmarks are good.
I tried with the last EVGA tool and you can see four different speeds flags : the 324 mhz one, the 706 one, the 1006 one ant the overboost 1059 one (without overclocking). If you stress the card, you can clearly see on this tool the real speed of the core going up and down.
Checked with some videos on the net showing the same tool, and the display is identical as mine.
May be the card is too new and some tools don't deal very well with it ?

[wasteomind]

Check to see if leaving the driver set to adaptive power management fixes the clock issues. I put mine at maximum performance and was getting locked at 705mhz. I went back to adaptive, rebooted, and haven't seen this issue since. It might not be playing nice with the driver trying to force clocks on it. Just a guess though.

EDIT I'm going to install Prototype shortly and see if I can confirm the issue mentioned above.

EDIT 2 no issues with Prototype here. 1920x1080 were selectable along with max settings and 4xaa all in game. Vram usage is over 600mb.

[swecarl]

Darren Hodgson: Ive read that its the drivers who in some cases causes the card to sometimes get "stuck" at lower clock rate.

[Darren Hodgson]

Originally Posted by wasteomind

Check to see if leaving the driver set to adaptive power management fixes the clock issues. I put mine at maximum performance and was getting locked at 705mhz. I went back to adaptive, rebooted, and haven't seen this issue since. It might not be playing nice with the driver trying to force clocks on it. Just a guess though.

Appreciate the reply.

So you recommend leaving the Global profile's Power Management on Adaptive then?

Leaving the Global profile set to Adaptive is not conductive to overclocking in my experience as when I tried that setting I saw the card underclock itself in Skyrim to 860 MHz, although I did have v-sync on and the game still ran at 60 fps without any tell-tale stuttering or anything. You could argue that if I'm getting 60 fps anyway then what does it matter? I'm obviously saving on power consumption and the card is generating less heat at that speed.

However, if the card is set to restrict power that it could feasibly have an adverse effect in other games where they're still capped at 60 fps with v-sync enabled but run with lower minimum framerates.

EDIT I'm going to install Prototype shortly and see if I can confirm the issue mentioned above.

EDIT 2 no issues with Prototype here. 1920x1080 were selectable along with max settings and 4xaa all in game. Vram usage is over 600mb.

Again, many thanks for verifying that. Seems that I will probably have to reinstall the game for it to detect my GTX 680 properly. There is probably a conflict at the moment from me having played it previously on a GTX 580.

Do you happen to have Bully Scholarship Edition from Rockstar. I loaded it up yesterday only to see black texture-less arms and torso on the lead character (his pants and head looked fine) but all other pupils and staff looked OK. Changing outfits didn't fix it. I'm wondering if this is a driver bug or whether, like Prototype, I'll need to reinstall the game again?

[Darren Hodgson]

Originally Posted by swecarl

Darren Hodgson: Ive read that its the drivers who in some cases causes the card to sometimes get "stuck" at lower clock rate.

Hopefully that's the case as, from the responses in this forum though, it doesn't look like I'm the only one that has seen this 'stuck 705 MHz core clock' issue.

[wasteomind]

Originally Posted by Darren Hodgson

Appreciate the reply.

So you recommend leaving the Global profile's Power Management on Adaptive then?

I'm not really recommending it, since I like to leave it on maximum performance as well, but as I mentioned before it seems to have solved my issue so the worst you can do is test it out and see what happens. It appears that atm the GTX680 ignores the setting and downclocks anyways, so it might just be a bug or incompatibility in the drivers at the moment. I don't know.

Originally Posted by Darren Hodgson

Again, many thanks for verifying that. Seems that I will probably have to reinstall the game for it to detect my GTX 680 properly. There is probably a conflict at the moment from me having played it previously on a GTX 580.

Do you happen to have Bully Scholarship Edition from Rockstar. I loaded it up yesterday only to see black texture-less arms and torso on the lead character (his pants and head looked fine) but all other pupils and staff looked OK. Changing outfits didn't fix it. I'm wondering if this is a driver bug or whether, like Prototype, I'll need to reinstall the game again?

No problem. I do not have Bully though.

[Birdy62]

Originally Posted by wasteomind

Check to see if leaving the driver set to adaptive power management fixes the clock issues. I put mine at maximum performance and was getting locked at 705mhz. I went back to adaptive, rebooted, and haven't seen this issue since. It might not be playing nice with the driver trying to force clocks on it. Just a guess though.

Good idea.. will try this evening. Thanks..

In fact, the card is not stuck at 706 mhz. The performance is there and all the benchmarks (and games) are at the right level (around 30 % more than the GTX 580). It seems more like a display problem...

[Bentez]

Whats going to allow us to push voltages past 1.175v?

Will it be done with an update to afterburner or will we need to mod the bios?

I'm not keen on hard modding like Chrispy - not brave enough

[Darren Hodgson]

Originally Posted by Bentez

Whats going to allow us to push voltages past 1.175v?

From my own experiences this card overclocks to ridiculous extremes without altering the voltages, which in my opinion is a very good thing as I've always chickened out of playing around with those on my previous cards for fear of frying them.

Doesn't the card already automatically adjust it's voltages anyway as you overclock? It certainly appears to because if I tried to overclock my old GTX 580 by just 63 Hz on the core then it would result in "driver not responding" errors. On the GTX 680 I've been able to push the core over 250 MHz beyond its default value without any such error.

[WhiteLightning]

i think its the gpu boost darren http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER3nv7NTwbs&t=23m8s

[Lavans]

Originally Posted by WhiteLightning

well tbh i dont really like FXAA lol , havent tested the new one though.
but that sure is one hell of a setting you got there
wish i could turn on sgssaa for skyrim again, but i dont have vram left and no money to upgrade to a 680gtx.

I've never tried SGSSAA with Skyrim. Out of curiosity, does it cause transparent textures to clip into each other? I know that with my HD5970, enabling transparency AA ( regardless if it was MSAA/SSAA, or in game ) would cause a lot of ground textures to break.

[WhiteLightning]

Originally Posted by Lavans

I've never tried SGSSAA with Skyrim. Out of curiosity, does it cause transparent textures to clip into each other? I know that with my HD5970, enabling transparency AA ( regardless if it was MSAA/SSAA, or in game ) would cause a lot of ground textures to break.

personally i think together with supersampling aa , its the best AA out there. it really fixes aliased textures.
ive never seen ground textures breaking tbh, everything is quite sharp.
its very demanding though.
also quite noticable is in burnout paradise for instance. a fast racing game where the distant textures start to aliase when your driving faster and faster.
with transperency aa on everything is smooth. so it works while going in a fast motion. (unlike other aa).

[Bentez]

Originally Posted by Darren Hodgson

From my own experiences this card overclocks to ridiculous extremes without altering the voltages, which in my opinion is a very good thing as I've always chickened out of playing around with those on my previous cards for fear of frying them.

Doesn't the card already automatically adjust it's voltages anyway as you overclock? It certainly appears to because if I tried to overclock my old GTX 580 by just 63 Hz on the core then it would result in "driver not responding" errors. On the GTX 680 I've been able to push the core over 250 MHz beyond its default value without any such error.

To a certain level, but there is a limit though and that is 1.175v

My cards mem overclocks great, have it running at 7.2GHz (+600Mhz!)

My core runs up to 1232MHz (+135v) before I get issues.(default settings it runs max at 1097MHz)

I'd like a tiny bit more juice to play with so I can bump the core up a little..

[Lavans]

Originally Posted by WhiteLightning

personally i think together with supersampling aa , its the best AA out there. it really fixes aliased textures.
ive never seen ground textures breaking tbh, everything is quite sharp.
its very demanding though.
also quite noticable is in burnout paradise for instance. a fast racing game where the distant textures start to aliase when your driving faster and faster.
with transperency aa on everything is smooth. so it works while going in a fast motion. (unlike other aa).

Fair enough
I'll have to check it out when I get home. Honestly I haven't noticed much difference between SGSSAA, transparency SSAA, or MSAA just yet, but I also haven't done much testing with them either. In the case of Skyrim, I have yet to notice any aliasing at 2560x1440/2xAA/FXAA. Unfortunately though, there's not much room to twiddle with in terms of VRam. Do you think it would be worth while cutting the resolution back to 1920x1080 to enable SGSSAA?

[Noisiv]

Originally Posted by Lavans

I've never tried SGSSAA with Skyrim. Out of curiosity, does it cause transparent textures to clip into each other? I know that with my HD5970, enabling transparency AA ( regardless if it was MSAA/SSAA, or in game ) would cause a lot of ground textures to break.

nope

MSAA, SGSSAA, TrSS, they all work nicely, but...

You need MSAA component, and MSAA is screwed with white outline on pretty much every deferred engine, Creation Engine included.

White outline is not allays visible, but it's there all right, hence - Downsampling + driver FXAA/SMAA FTW!!

[WhiteLightning]

Originally Posted by Lavans

Fair enough
I'll have to check it out when I get home. Honestly I haven't noticed much difference between SGSSAA, transparency SSAA, or MSAA just yet, but I also haven't done much testing with them either. In the case of Skyrim, I have yet to notice any aliasing at 2560x1440/2xAA/FXAA. Unfortunately though, there's not much room to twiddle with in terms of VRam. Do you think it would be worth while cutting the resolution back to 1920x1080 to enable SGSSAA?

cant really tell tbh. i would certainly try it if i were you. (set bTransparencyMultisampling=1,iWaterMultiSamples=4, iMultiSample=8,bFXAAEnabled=0 in the config, and in inspector transpiracy supersampling at 4 or higher).

Originally Posted by Noisiv

White outline is not allays visible, but it's there all right, hence - Downsampling + driver FXAA/SMAA FTW!!

there are very few games that show a white line tbh , most of them work just fine. (maybe its mostly ue3 games ? ) im not a fan of fxaa/smaa either, transp aa is much more crisp , especially in motion. i do like downsampling though, but never use it due to limitations of my monitor.

[Lavans]

Originally Posted by WhiteLightning

cant really tell tbh. i would certainly try it if i were you. (set bTransparencyMultisampling=1,iWaterMultiSamples=4, iMultiSample=8,bFXAAEnabled=0 in the config, and in inspector transpiracy supersampling at 4 or higher).

Awesome, thanks for the tip

Originally Posted by WhiteLightning

im not a fan of fxaa/smaa either, transp aa is much more crisp , especially in motion. i do like downsampling though, but never use it due to limitations of my monitor.

By itself, post process AA really isn't that great, so it's understandable that there's people who aren't crazy about it. However, when using FXAA/MLAA/SMAA with moderate amounts of AA and transparency AA, the blurring effect becomes far less noticeable and is generally more resource friendly. The down side is that using post process AA can actually cause aliasing artifacts if it's being used with high(er) levels of MSAA/SSAA in some games.

[ricardonuno1980]

Originally Posted by WhiteLightning

cant really tell tbh. i would certainly try it if i were you. (set bTransparencyMultisampling=1,iWaterMultiSamples=4, iMultiSample=8,bFXAAEnabled=0 in the config, and in inspector transpiracy supersampling at 4 or higher).

piracy!??? aahahah!! lol! xxxxxpiracy - bad but yes xxxxxparency

[pimp_gimp]

I haven't posted in this thread for a bit, but here are some 3DMark11 an Heaven 3.0 results at the clocks I have set that are shown in Afterburner.

[Xtreme1979]

Small overclock results:



3DMark 11: P10316
http://3dmark.com/3dm11/3063930

3DMark 11: X3665
http://3dmark.com/3dm11/3064336

3DMark Vantage: 35939
http://3dmark.com/3dmv/3989181

[rakunvar]

So.. Completely wiped my Nvidia drivers last night after my random FPS drop. Re installed the 310.10, OCscanners test again now showed the 650ish FPS again. After tweaking with my processor later and such, nothing with GPU, re-ran same test and its AGAIN back to the 350range FPS.. Not like its a benchmark or whatnot but no clue why its doing this...

Gonna try yet again to wipe I think.

[pimp_gimp]

Originally Posted by rakunvar

So.. Completely wiped my Nvidia drivers last night after my random FPS drop. Re installed the 310.10, OCscanners test again now showed the 650ish FPS again. After tweaking with my processor later and such, nothing with GPU, re-ran same test and its AGAIN back to the 350range FPS.. Not like its a benchmark or whatnot but no clue why its doing this...

Gonna try yet again to wipe I think.

I think they just need to release a better driver, as I've been having issues with it as well, sometimes the profiles don't work (SLI won't be used, even when I tell the driver to use AFR1 or AFR2), the frame rate limiter randomly will be enabled (and I won't know unless I check via inspector), also I've noticed that some the options have issues when you try to customize them, as they don't stay selected once you select them.

[Darren Hodgson]

Originally Posted by Xtreme1979

Small overclock results:



3DMark 11: 10316
http://3dmark.com/3dm11/3063930

3DMark Vantage: 35939
http://3dmark.com/3dmv/3989181

Nice results but why Performance and not Extreme?

I ran 3DMark Vantage last night (I'd forgotten how terrible those Graphics Tests actually are) and score X29500-ish (Extreme). I didn't run the Performance one though.