Guru3D GeForce GTX 690 review is out

Nvidia SLI experience is much better than AMD crossfire, most of my games scale well, without issues. My experience with 3 generations of ATI crossfire cards were pretty awful. My last card, a 5970 was a nightmare in that matter.

I'm pretty happy with my rig, as well as my previous 580 SLI.

 

I'm dreaming of a GTX 690 8GB and Arctic making a Cooler for it.

Shame it will be a dream forever

 

HardOCP also made a point about how SLI feels noticeably smoother than CFX too, something which cannot be found by just looking at the benchmarks. So they say anyway.

I don't think I'd ever try CFX again but I might possibly try SLI at some point. Maybe. The thing of it is though that by the time I need more graphics performance, there's usually a faster single GPU option available so I get that instead of a second older card. (The only reason I even bothered with HD 5870 CFX in the first place was because the GTX 480 was getting disappointing reviews and I knew that a single HD 5870 was slower)

 

Some people get problems regarding dual gpus and some people don't,fortunately I never ever have had problems regarding dual gpus while gaming,they just as good as single gpus for me,no different.

The 690 is a great card if you want to go quad sli without the physical space of 4x680s whic is something I would never do I will only ever run 2 physical cards no matter what mobo I have,if your gonna only use 2cards may as well get the most powerful and be done with it just like I did with my 295's in 2009.

 

My monitor have a resolution of 2560x1440, so one gtx680 is not enough to max out detail on current games, but for 1080p, one card is enough.

 

@Darren - SLI is miles better than crossfire Ive used it with three setups and no doubt its getting better with age.

Seeing the performance at 2650x1600 with two GK104s I will be investing in my fourth SLI rig as soon as funds allow. I would have definitely gone with the 690 had it been out a month ago, no real compromise between it and 680SLI.

 

I paid £840 for mine at scan,there now £899 and they may continue to rise even more after the 7th may.

 

Feck, thats a lot of cash!

 

Yeap but i was also going to buy the 590 the minute that was released but im glad i didnt now,i thought be patient and wait,the right card will come along soon and it has,the 690 is a great upgrade for me from my 295's.It will last me alongtime.

 

When is the card going to be finally up for sale? about another week right? newegg,etc.

 

http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/...dia-geforce-gtx-690/8/#abschnitt_mikroruckler

Apparently they for the most part solved Micro Stuttering by filtering the frames. Pretty cool. Thanks to Nosiviv or whatever for pointing it out.

 

You can also sli one of these with a 680,or a 690 so you can go for triple or quad sli.

 

That's really impressive.

 

i really couldnt care what the specs are after seeing this
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Latest-Gr...113?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item231ce814e9
and yet scan.c.uk have it for under £900

 

nobody is going to buy it, especially from someone with zero feedback

 

your poor performance with the 5970 may have been a system config issue,i had a 5970 and never had scaling issues,the same with 2x5870s,2x6970s and with my current 4890s,ive always had near if not more than double the performance in crossfire,but in nvidia`s defence ive had 2x7600gt`s and 2 x 285s in sli with near double performance,scaling issues are usually a driver or game developers problem,neither amd or nvidia nail the drivers straight away

 

didnt notice that,but i checked his/her details and the account has been active since october 2011 with no buying or selling...doesnt look good,evga 690`s priced at $1,049.99 for the gtx 690 Signature pack,which is $50`s more than the standard($999.00) pack but inc`s a teashirt and a mouse pad on a side note both are limited to 1 per household so obviously very limited

 

When crossfire works it usually scales pretty well, but there are tons of games where it doesn't work.

Anandtech says it right in the GTX680 review:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5805/...view-ultra-expensive-ultra-rare-ultra-fast/19

 

so because they say its broken im supposed to believe it,they also say 680 sli is better than the 690
Quote" As a $999 card it doesn’t double the performance of the $499 GTX 680, but SLI has never offered quite that much of a performance boost"

just because they say they couldnt run some tests on a 5970 doesnt mean nvidia is better than amd,i bet they couldnt run the same tests on the nvidia equivilent.

7970cf trounced all over the 690 and 680sli in the Crysis: Warhead 5760x1200 bench mark which prooves the amd cf performs well, oh look crysis WH is optimised for nvidia which just goes to show again that nvidia are no better than amd

Anandtech Crysis: Warhead 5760x1200 bench mark results
7970 cf 78fps (winner)
680sli 66.5
690 64.6

Crysis: Warhead 1920x1200 bench mark results
7970 cf 99.7fps(winner)
680sli 87fps
690 85.5 fps

amd also trounced nvidia in the metro test too

so how is amd cf broken

personally i dont give a rats a$$ what anandtech say about amd or nvidia but the evidence showed that amd performed better in there bench mark tests and they didnt showcase the 690 as being the best performance solution

 

I'll repeat what I said, when crossfire works it scales well, but there are games where it doesn't work at all.

Anandtech performed 10 gaming tests with both Crossfire and SLI, Crossfire failed 20% of the time, SLI worked on every test. And even in the tests it worked, Nvidia outperformed it 62% of the time, 70% overall.

And the 680SLI does perform 4% better overall than the 690, so they are right that it's technically faster, although the 690 has other advantages. The Nvidia equivalent of the 7970 crossfire is the 680SLI/590/580SLI which scale to some degree in all 10 tests.

I wouldn't personally call Crossfire broken, but it's definitely not functioning as well as SLI is in the 10 tests anandtech chose, which are pretty common games.