NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690

[Becky]

Further to the news posted by V_R on Tuesday, the GTX 690 card is here! According to NVIDIA the GTX 690 is capable of matching two GTX 680s in SLI, and the test results seen certainly seem to back this up. All reviews that I have seen describe this as the fastest single GPU that they have seen... but the $1000 price tag is likely to put many people off.

Reviews are available here:

Tech Power Up
Hardware Heaven
Bjorn 3D
Hot Hardware
Benchmark Reviews

 

[V_R]

Bad pricing by NV, around the £850 and up mark is way over priced.....

 

[floppybootstomp]

690 - £850 - £900
680 - £450 - £600
580 - £300 - £350
560/560Ti/560Ti 448 - £135 - £200

There is no way I'd ever pay £850 for a graphics card, I doubt whether there's accompanying hardware or any games currently available that could justify that price tag.

Above I've listed Nvidia card prices. I have a 1Gb 560 so the only upgrade I'd consider from that lot is a 3Gb 580. And to be quite honest, as most games I have run and look just fine with my humble 560 it's just not worth the outlay.

I recently splashed out around £260 on a 27" BenQ Monitor, a graphics improvement that I personally considered well worth the money.

Let's get things in perspective here.

 

[EvanDavis]

£850 ??? For that I could buy myself a half decent system that would more than satisfy my needs and play the few games I play without any problem

 

[BenchZowner]

It's a buck cheaper than getting 2 GTX 680s
Performance is pretty much on par ( sometimes even higher, sometimes a tad lower ).
Oh well...

I'd never go Multi-GPU ( be it 2 GPUs on a single PCB or 2 single-GPU graphics cards ) for gaming anyway.

What nVIDIA is currently doing is... profiting.
And they're profiting big thanks to the very big margins thanks to AMD's "absence" or "weak" coming with the 7xxx series.

They're selling a $175-200 production cost GK104 as a $499 GTX 680 graphics card, and a $380-420 2*GK104 production cost card as a $999 GTX 690 graphics card.

They're also going to launch the cheaper alternative to the GTX 680, the GTX 670 graphics card real soon ( 1344SPs, 32 ROPs, 128TMUs, 256BIT, 2GB, MSRP ~ $429 ).
And probably before mid-September, we'll also have the GTX 660 Ti and the GTX 660.

They're aiming for a record high economic quarter, and it certainly looks like they'll make it happen, unless something goes wrong for them or good for AMD.

 

[muckshifter]

come on folks, what "company" do you know, that is not in it for the profit.

I recently "tested" a game out, and although I have a below par PC, it coped, however, many people complained that there was something wrong, the FPS was crap in parts not to mention a few other inconsistencies that shouldn't have been there.

These complaints were generally coming from people with high spec systems, meself, I'm actually getting a new "bundle" to help ease some of the problems I encountered, it won't be a new graphics card.

The game Devs in question responded with ... ah yes, we know about some of the problems, but the game doesn't yet use the GPU, just the CPU, and only one core of that, optimisation is still being worked on.


I'll look forward to its £150 price tag, if I'm still around.

 

[floppybootstomp]

come on folks, what "company" do you know, that is not in it for the profit.

A company that isn't started to make a profit is something of an oxymoron.

However, there's 'fair trading' and 'taking advantage of one's position and truly ripping the heart out of your customers'.

I believe Nvidia stand accused of the latter.

It's enough to make a boy take a chance with AMD video drivers...

 

[EvanDavis]

I believe Nvidia stand accused of the latter.

And Apple

 

[Ian]

Ouch, now that is expensive . I'm more than happy with my 560 and will have this for some time to come (unless this goes in to Becky's machine, in which case I'll aim for the 660!).

 

[floppybootstomp]

And Apple

Funny you should mention that, I have been reading increasing amounts of flak directed at Apple lately with their 'closed code' policies, they make Microsoft look almost open source

I was also going to say that for £850 (The cost of the 690) you could buy an Apple i-Mac. But. You can't. i-Macs start at £1K.

You could buy a nice second hand Peugeot though