GeForce GTX 680 Is 40% Faster Than AMD Radeon HD 7970, Slide Claims

We tend to be skeptical about marketing slides, especially those made by a company in order to promote their new products, but the one NVIDIA leaked recently still deserves a once-over. 

The slide in the picture appeared on the NGF Community forums and is basically a comparison chart between the upcoming NVIDIA board and AMD's two strongest, single-GPU Radeon cards. 

The pink bar is the Radeon HD 7950, the red bar is the HD 7970 and the green bar is, naturally, the one corresponding to the GeForce GTX 680. 

All three cards were benchmarked in a variety of games, both with and without AA (anti-aliasing). 

There seems to be a single instance where the Keplerbased adapter did not leave the other two behind: Civilization V, but only with 4xAA. GTX 680 still led when AA was disabled. 

At the other end of the spectrum, there is the Battlefield 3 benchmark with 4xAA enabled. NVIDIA may or may not have been using the FXAA algorithm when it conducted these runs. 

Either way, the Santa Clara, California-based company is dead set on leaving AMD's Radeon HD 7970 in the dust. 

This leak basically implies that the GeForce GTX 680 is up to 40% faster than the Radeon HD 7970, and much better than the 7950. 

If the GPU maker delivers on this hype, it won't have a hard time earning the fastest-GPU crown. We'll wait to see before we believe, though. 

NVIDIA will launch the GeForce GTX 680, powered by the GK104 Kepler graphics processing unit, on March 23, assuming prior reports are valid. After that, a dual-chip beast will be launched, in May. 

Until then, NVIDIA customers should make the best of the hardware they already own. One way to do that is to get the latest driver, the 296.10 WHQL version, that appeared just the other day. There is even a software package for Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system, or the preview anyway. Go get it below.

NVIDIA GeForce Display Driver 296.10 for XP

NVIDIA GeForce Display Driver 296.10 for XP64
NVIDIA GeForce Display Driver 296.10 for Vista/Windows 7
NVIDIA GeForce Display Driver 296.10 for Vista64/Windows 7 x64
NVIDIA Verde Notebook Display Driver 296.10 for Vista/Windows 7
NVIDIA Verde Notebook Display Driver 296.10 for Vista64/Windows 7 x64

NVIDIA GeForce Display Driver 296.17 for Windows 8 x32

NVIDIA GeForce Display Driver 296.17 for Windows 8 x64

Posted in: Hardware, Preview