Technical data / specifications

The GeForce GTX 680 is NVIDIAs new flagship model regarding their GPU portfolio. This card is based on the GK104 chip which is being manufactured using TSMCs new 28 nanometer process technology. At a first glance you can see that NVIDIA has changed the logo as well as the design of the cooler. Generally we like it.

Looking at cock speeds we see that the GPU runs at 1006 MHz and the GDDR5 memory clocks at 6000 MHz. Furhtermore there is 256 bit memory interface we results in a XXXX Megabyte per second memory bandwidth. In total there is 2'048 Megabyte of GDDR5 memory.

The GPU itself consists of 3.54 billion transistors. The architectural hierarchy starts with a so called GigaThread Engine, which marshals processed and unprocessd information between the GPU and the PCI-Express 3.0 system interface. Further down in the hierarchy there are four Graphics Processing Clusters (GPCs), which can be seen as a common resource. At this point you'll also find a the raster eingine and two streaming multiprocessors (SMs). Altough NVIDIA decided to change their name which means that they're now called SMX. A closer look at the SMX shows that they support a new PolyMorph 2.0 engine, an instruction cache, 192 CUDA cores and furhter first level caches. If you do the maths based on four GPCs with two SMXs each, 16 SMXs, 192 CUDA Cores, we get a total of 1536 CUDA cores. This is three times as much as you can find on a GeForce GTX 580, which supported "only" 512 CUDA Cores. There are also four raster units, which means that there are 32 ROPs, eight geometry units, whereby each features with a tessellation unit as well as third level cache.

	GeFroce GTX 680	GeForce GTX 580	Radeon HD 7970	Radeon HD 7950
Chip	GK104	Cypress XT	Tahiti	Tahiti
Process	28 nm	40 nm	28 nm	28 nm
Transistors	3.54 billion	3.00 billion	4.31 billion	4.31 billion
GPU clock	1'006 MHz	772 MHz	925 MHz	800 MHz
Shader clock	1'411 MHz	1'544 MHz	925 MHz	800 MHz
Memory	2'048 MB GDDR5	1'536 MB GDDR5	3'072 MB GDDR5	3'072 MB GDDR5
Memory clock	6'000 MHz	4'008 MHz	5'500 MHz	5'000 MHz
Memory interface	256 Bit	384 Bit	384 Bit	384 Bit
Memory bandwidth	192'400 MB/s	192'384 MB/s	264'000 MB/s	240'000 MB/s
TMUs	128	64	128	2x 96
TAUs		64	128	2x 96
Shader Cores	1'536 (5D)	512 (5D)	2'048 (1D)	1'792 (1D)
ROPs	32 ROP	48 ROP	32 ROP	32 ROP
Shader model	SM 5	SM 5	SM 5.1	SM 5.1
Maximum board power	185 Watt	244 Watt	250 Watt	200 Watt

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 8 - Stone Giant
Page 2 - Technical Data / Specifications	Page 9 - World in Conflict
Page 3 - Preview / Delivery	Page 10 - Resident Evil 5
Page 4 - Testing conditions	Page 11 - Call of Juarez
Page 5 - 3D Mark 11	Page 12 - Far Cry 2
Page 6 - 3D Mark Vantage	Page 13 - Overclocking
Page 7 - Unigine Heaven	Page 14 - Conclusion

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