Nvidia GTX 680 Kepler summary

So Kepler/GK104/GTX 680 is finally released and I thought I'd give you guys a quick summary of how it performs and stuff.


Performance
As you'd expect, it's the fastest single GPU card, even beating the 7970. This is to be expected since it was the same deal with the 480 and 580. By how much you ask? Overall it's about 6% faster than the 7970.
Like always it depends on what game you're looking at. The 7970, and even the 7950 is fastest than the 680 in Crysis Warhead on high resolution and settings at max. But the 680 is fastest in for example Battlefield 3. Like I said, overall the difference in terms of performance is pretty minimal. The difference is much smaller than the difference between the 6970 and the 580. We might see a bigger performance gap in a few weeks/months when drivers are more mature though.
I am only going to post the performance summary chart from techpowerup. If you want performance figures for specific tests then please visit TechPowerUp's article or Anandtech's article.

Power Consumption
Are you guys ready for a shock? The GTX 680 use 20-30 watts LESS than the 7970 under load. A single GTX 680 will use about 173 watts by itself when stressed. The 7970 use about 195 watts by itself.
I am very surprised by this.


Temperature
Temperature wise the 680 isn't that much different from the 7970. A few tests shows the 680 being slightly hotter but it's only by a few degrees and might as well be within margin of error. Just like with the power consumption I am very impressed by Nvidia.


Noise
The GTX 680 is with the reference cooler is less noisy than the 7970's reference design, and it's a pretty significant difference. Anandtech reports a 4.8 dB difference (57.3 vs 52.5) and as some of you probably know, the noise level is doubled for each 10 dB. So 60 dB is twice as loud as 50 dB.
It seems like the 680's fan profile is set to a more silence oriented approach. They could probably have made the 680 cooler than the 7970, but it would have meant increasing the noise.


Overclocking
Stock settings are 1006MHz on the core and 1500MHz on the memory.

TechPowerUp managed to get the card running at 1159MHz (15%) on the core and 1833MHz (22%) on the memory. That's about the same, percentage wise, as the 7970.

Guru3D managed to get their card running at 1264MHz (25.6%) on the core and 1658MHz (10.6%) on the memory.



Price
The suggested retail price of the GTX 680 is 500 USD which is quite a bit lower than the 7970. This is very good news for us consumers because it will force AMD to lower the price on the 7970 to stay competitive.
As far as I can tell, the only cards on the market are reference design cards so we might see slightly cheaper cards later, and also slightly more expensive ones when manufacturers start making their own changes to the card.
I am very surprised to see that Nvidia offers better price:performance than AMD, and it's a fairly big difference as well.


Other things
GPU Boost
This is something Nvidia developed to increase performance per wattage. What it does is change the clock frequency, as well as the voltage, on the card depending on temperature, load and other things.
The stock frequency is 1006MHz and with GPU boost it can go up to 1110MHz.

TXAA
This is a new anti-aliasing technology Nvidia developed. TXAA currently has two levels.
The first level will produce images about as good as 8X MSAA while only using as much GPU power as 2X MSAA.
The second level, called TXAA2, will offer image quality higher than 16X MSAA and only use about as much power as 4X MSAA.
Most games do not support TXAA, but you can force it on in the Nvidia control panel.

PhysX
They made some improvements to PhysX like dynamic fracture and also improved the way fur and hair is acting. To be honest, I don't give a damn about this because the amount of games which use PhysX is very low. Also, the amount of games which will use these new PhysX features will be even smaller.

Nvidia 3D surround
The GTX 680 will support up to 4 displays (3 fully powered "gaming monitors" and one "accessory" display) powered by a single card. The previous Nvidia graphics cards have been limited to 2 displays per GPU.
The new card features:
Two DVI ports
One HDMI port
One full size DisplayPort
I am not sure if you need to power at least one monitor through the DisplayPort connector or if you can run three displays from the DVI and HDMI connectors alone, but it seems like you can. On AMD cards you are limited to a maximum of two monitors from DVI/HDMI combined, which means that you HAVE to get a DisplayPort adapter, or DisplayPort ready monitor for triple screen setups.

Adaptive V-Sync
This doesn't seem to be that interesting. From what I've gathered it's basically turns V-sync off if you dip below the FPS limit of your monitor (usually 60), and automatically turns it on if you go above it, in order to prevent screen tearing. Why not leave it on at all time? Because if you have it on at all time then you might get stuttering because V-Sync forces you down to 30 FPS when you're actually rendering maybe 50 FPS.

This new V-sync will also work with Nvidia 3D surround to make sure the middle monitor gets more FPS than the side ones, if necessary.


Summary
The GTX 680 is a fantastic card. I can honestly not think of a single reason to get the 7970 over the GTX 680.