Remember that event we couldn’t talk about a few days ago? Well the official embargo has been lifted and our lips are now unsealed to detail the arrival of the fastest and most power efficient GPU ever made: the GTX 680. The new GPU is based on NVIDIA’s new GPU architecture, codenamed Kepler that uses the company’s new 28nm manufacturing process. NVIDIA says that the GTX 680 is not only the fastest processor that’s currently out in the market, it’s also the most power efficient. To put the improvements in perspective, the GTX 680 is 300 percent faster in DirectX 11 tessellation performance (when compared to AMD’s Radeon HD 7970) and up to 43 percent faster in games like Skyrim.
The new GPU also brings a couple of new technologies to the table, the most exciting of which is GPU boost. Put simply, the new tech allows your card to boost performance if there’s still available headroom in terms of TDP (thermal design power). Think of it as Intel’s turbo-boost technology but for GPUs. Obviously we’re oversimplifying it a bit, but in theory it performs the same way – as long as there’s enough available headroom when it comes to TDP and automatically adjusts the clock speed based on the power consumed by the currently running app. The card that automatically overclocks itself, basically.
Another new tech that comes with Kepler is TXAA. TXAA is a new anti-aliasing tech that NVIDIA has invented that’s even higher than traditional anti-aliasing modes. TXAA combines the raw power of MSAA with sophisticated resolve filters similar to those employed in CG films. In addition, TXAA can also jitter sample locations between frames for even higher quality. In TXAA 1, gamers get the performance of 2xMSAA and quality that’s on par with 8xMSAA. TXAA 2 ramps that up even more, giving gamers the performance of 4xMSAA with quality even higher than 8xMSAA.
The Fermi series of GPUs were much maligned due to their limited two monitor limit when using multiple monitors. That’s not a problem anymore – NVIDIA’s new Kepler GPUs are now able to support three monitors for gaming, with an option to add a fourth one for web and IM.
From what we’ve seen in Malaysia last Monday, NVIDIA has managed to strike a homerun with the new GTX 680. Though we haven’t had a chance to actually play and test it to our satisfaction, we like what we see on paper. We’ll update you guys as soon as we get our grubby little mitts on it.