After riding on Fermi’s architecture for the past two years through GeForce 400 and 500 series of GPUs, NVIDIA today has finally launched the successor to Fermi called “Kepler”. First revealed to the world in September 2010, the new architecture formed the basis of the new GeForce 600 series GPUs which is led by the enthusiast-level GeForce GTX 680.
According to NVIDIA, the new GeForce GTX 680 is the fastest and most efficient GPU that the company has ever built. Through the new Kepler-based 28nm core which features a redesigned streaming multiprocessor architecture that NVIDIA dubbed as SMX, the new GeForce GTX 680 comes ready with 1536 stream processors a.k.a CUDA Cores – three times more than what Fermi-based GTX 580 offered.
The new SMX architecture not only gives more CUDA Cores to GTX 680 but it also enables the new GPU to offer more performance per watt as compared to GTX 580. In fact, GTX 680 thermal design power consumption is rated at 195W that is obviously much lower than GTX 580’s 244W and this is further reflected by GTX 680’s combination of 6-pin PCI-E power connector as opposed to the usual combo of 8-pin and 6-pin connectors that is very typical on a high-end graphics card.
In terms of performances in numbers, the new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 comes with a base processing clock of 1006MHz that can be boosted further up to 1058MHz and is paired together with 2GB worth of 256-bit GDDR5 that runs at 6.0Gbps.
In addition to that, the GTX 680 also comes with a new GPU Boost function which dynamically optimizes GPU speed in real-time based on factors such as GPU temperature, hardware utilization and power consumption. The new GPU is also packed with other neat features such the support for new anti-aliasing techniques called FXAA and TXAA together with Adaptive V-Sync, four display output (with three of them in 3D), improved PhysX performances as well as the support for PCI Express 3.0 and DirectX 11.1.
With an expected price tag of RM 1,538 (USD 499), established add-in card manufacturers such as ASUS, Colorful, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision 3D, MSI, Palit, Point of View, PNY, and Zotac have already started to ship their GeForce GTX 680 graphics cards to stores throughout the world. Do give a call to your favorite IT retailers to find out more about its availability here in Malaysia. For further information on what GTX 680 is able to offer to consumers, head on to www.geforce.com.
(Lowyat.net)
0 comments:
