“How do you follow up on Fermi?” That’s the question we had going into NVIDIA’s press briefing for the GeForce GTX 680 and the Kepler architecture earlier this month. With Fermi NVIDIA not only captured the performance crown for gaming, but they managed to further build on their success in the professional markets with Tesla and Quadro. Though it was a very clearly a rough start for NVIDIA, Fermi ended up doing quite well in the end.
So how do you follow up on Fermi? As it turns out, you follow it up with something that is in many ways more of the same. With a focus on efficiency, NVIDIA has stripped Fermi down to the core and then built it back up again; reducing power consumption and die size alike, all while maintaining most of the aspects we’ve come to know with Fermi. The end result of which is NVIDIA’s next generation GPU architecture: Kepler.
Launching today is the GeForce GTX 680, at the heart of which is NVIDIA’s new GK104 GPU, based on their equally new Kepler architecture. As we’ll see, not only has NVIDIA retaken the performance crown with the GeForce GTX 680, but they have done so in a manner truly befitting of their drive for efficiency.
| GTX 680 | GTX 580 | GTX 560 Ti | GTX 480 | |
| Stream Processors | 1536 | 512 | 384 | 480 |
| Texture Units | 128 | 64 | 64 | 60 |
| ROPs | 32 | 48 | 32 | 48 |
| Core Clock | 1006MHz | 772MHz | 822MHz | 700MHz |
| Shader Clock | N/A | 1544MHz | 1644MHz | 1401MHz |
| Boost Clock | 1058MHz | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Memory Clock | 6.008GHz GDDR5 | 4.008GHz GDDR5 | 4.008GHz GDDR5 | 3.696GHz GDDR5 |
| Memory Bus Width | 256-bit | 384-bit | 256-bit | 384-bit |
| Frame Buffer | 2GB | 1.5GB | 1GB | 1.5GB |
| FP64 | 1/24 FP32 | 1/8 FP32 | 1/12 FP32 | 1/12 FP32 |
| TDP | 195W | 244W | 170W | 250W |
| Transistor Count | 3.5B | 3B | 1.95B | 3B |
| Manufacturing Process | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 40nm | TSMC 40nm | TSMC 40nm |
| Launch Price | $499 | $499 | $249 | $499 |
