Caffeine & Octane 2013

I recently spent a week in our nation’s capital, and as Marion Berry, the crack-smoking ex-Mayor once observed, “If you take out the killings, Washington actually has a very very low crime rate.” Fortunately, we didn’t encounter any of that but rather it was the traffic congestion that was so horrendous. Perpetual roadwork on I-95 meant that at one time we spent nearly two hours in traffic to go just 30 miles. Understandably, this can be quite an inconvenience when you have to cover 1000 miles each way.  

While exotic cars were few and far between (I spotted an Aston Martin Vanquish Convertible in Georgetown) I managed to hit the Caffeine & Octane event in Atlanta on the way back. I covered this event last year and it does not disappoint.  The emphasis is on exotics and muscle cars, and where else can you see a circa 1960s Mercury Cougar race a Ferrari F430 and Porsche 911 down I-75?

Caffeine & Octane is held the first Sunday of every month and the weather on that early August morning couldn’t have been nicer. The event officially kicks off at 8 a.m. but I stumbled out of the Marriott behind it at 6:15 when it was still dark and found the parking venue was already half-full. Larry the Cable Guy once joked that even a cheerleader couldn’t arouse him out of bed at 5 a.m. and I feel the same way. But despite dragging in from D.C. just five hours earlier, I was determined not to miss it.

Off in the distance, I could hear the quiet morning being shattered by random bursts of high-pitched acceleration as the cars drew closer. Only owners and enthusiasts with gasoline in their veins are dedicated enough to sacrifice a Sunday morning for this. And at Caffeine & Octane, the mantra “If it’s too loud, you’re too old” doesn’t apply to music but to a car’s exhaust system. Georgia has smog testing but clearly there were a lot of clever individuals who had circumvented it as the air was rife with the sweet smell of race gas and horsepower. 

BEVERLY HILLS CONVERTIBLE: I was hoping for a good Ferrari turnout so I could see some newer models such as the 458 Italia and 599 in the flesh. Unfortunately, the sole new 2013 Ferrari California there was more country-club cruiser than racetrack corner-carver. Introduced in 2008, this 2+2 hardtop convertible resurrects the "California" name used on the 1950s Ferrari 250 GT (a model some may remember from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). It has been speculated that this vehicle was originally destined for Maserati until high manufacturing costs forced Fiat to rebadge it as a Ferrari. Nevertheless, it represents a number of production firsts for a Ferrari such as direct gasoline injection, a folding metal roof, multi-link rear suspension, a seven-speed dual clutch transmission and a 480hp front-engine V8.      

DOG DAY AFTERNOON: “You Lucky Dog!” takes on a literal meaning as this pit bull looks pensively from the passenger seat of a Porsche 911 GT3 RS. Thankfully, Michael Vick was not driving  but the thought of the dog’s claws digging into the soft Alcantara seats makes baby Jesus cry. The GT3 designation comes from the FIA European race series of the same name and signifies a lightweight model stripped of such luxuries as air-conditioning, rear seats, sunroof and sound deadening materials. The RS for “Racing Sport” lightens it further with a carbon fiber hood and rear wing, ceramic composite brakes and a polycarbonate rear window. The bizarre orange-on-black color scheme also attests to either a really strange fascination with Halloween or a history of bad decisions such as letting a canine ride in a $100,000 sports car.   

STRIKING DISTANCE: I can now cross this off my automotive bucket list as I’ve been wanting to see one since they debuted last fall. However, the Gunmetal Pearl paint and the $5000 racing stripes are not a combination I would have chosen. With “Dodge” noticeably dropped from the name, the 2013 SRT Viper slithers on with a 640hp 6.4-liter V10 and numerous upgrades and improvements over the last generation.  Standard amenities now include electronic stability control, traction control, xenon projector headlamps and LED daytime running lights, turn signals and tail lamps. Despite being slightly slower than the Corvette ZR-1 around a racetrack, the Viper remains the most visually arresting domestic available.

BLACK SUNSHINE: Regardless of sporting the oldest design here, this 2004 Porsche Carrera GT was easily my top pick at this year’s Caffeine & Octane. Like the Viper, it also uses a V10 that generates 612hp and traces its roots back to the 1992 Formula One Footwork team. Strangely, the Carrera GT’s development was stalled in 1999 so Porsche could focus on its new mass-market Cayenne SUV. However, interest in the project and revenue from the Cayenne allowed Porsche to build 1,270 units with 604 of those coming to North America. In tribute to its Le Man heritage, the Carrera GT’s ignition is to the left of the steering wheel and has a wooden gear knob similar to the one in the legendary Porsche 917. 

WEAPON OF MASS DISTRACTION: The highest horsepower award goes to this 2006 Ford Shadrach Mustang GT by Pure Power Motorsports. Surprisingly, this bruiser-blue pony make 900hp from the factory 4.6-liter V8 courtesy of twin water-to-air Precision turbochargers, dual water-to-air intercoolers, a Metco billet turbo plenum and a Kinsler 8-Stack injection system. And keeping the highly-stressed engine in one piece are (among other things) forged aluminum pistons and Manley H-beam connecting rods. It may not be pretty, but it sure is powerful!

DUKW DYNASTY: This was the only vehicle I actually rode in (aside from the 2013 Chrysler Town & Country we rented) but it was faster in the water than anything else here. The DUKW (colloquially known as “Duck”) is part of DC Ducks, a company that offers 90-minute land and sea tours of the city. Originally built after the invasion of Pearl Harbor in 1942, it was the bastard offspring of a British deep water sailor, a Lieutenant from MIT, and a yacht designer. Powered by a GMC 270 cubic-inch six-cylinder, it weighs 6.5 tons and has a top speed of 50 mph on the highway and 6 mph in the water. Unfortunately, ours was missing its original .50-caliber machine gun which is something I would have loved for the traffic jams.   

Nvidia GTX 670 Benchmarks

With Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli promising that Crysis 3 will "melt your PC" due to its uncompromising next-generation visuals, I recently upgraded to Nvidia's GTX 670. Truth be told, I was a little astonished when I realized my GTX 570 would be blowing out its second candle in a couple months. It's done so well in recent games like Borderlands 2, Dishonored and Far Cry 3 that I tended to forget its age. But it was the arrival this year of brand new benchmarks such as 3DMark 13 and Unigine Valley that emphasized just how long 20 months can be in the technology industry. Herewith is a look at the generational improvements in moving from the GTX 570 to the GTX 670.

 

YIN & YANG

"Kepler", Nvidia's code name for the 600-series, says as much about the GTX 670 as did the "Fermi" moniker for the Three-Mile Island GTX 480. In 1601, noted scientist Johannes Kepler wrote, "Where there is matter, there is geometry." Unlike Nostradamus, there's no way Kepler had any inclination that four centuries later he would be named after the fastest line of consumer graphics cards the world has ever seen. And while his quote was initially applied to astronomy, it is equally apropos for the 102,480 Million texels per second generated by the GTX 670. He would also not have understood that his namesake video card represents more than just a die shrink from 40nm to 28nm. In fact, this new architecture allowed Nvidia to pack more circuits in less physical area. In the GTX 570, Stream Processors (SM) are the basic building blocks of the graphics pipeline. Inside each Fermi SM block is 32 cores, so with 15 SMs the 570 had a total of 480 Stream Processors. But with the 670, Nvidia redesigned the Stream Processors enabling a whopping 192 cores to fit inside one Kepler SMX. And the extra overhead didn't stop there. Each Kepler SMX also benefits from its own tessellation engine known as Polymorph which contains 16 texture units. These improvements are why the 670 has so many more Stream Processors and Texture Units than the 570.

The only items (on paper) not significantly higher in Kepler are the Raster Operations per second (ROPs) and the Memory Bus Width. Kepler’s ROP count has been reduced from the 40 ROPs of Fermi down to 32 (eight per memory controller). However, this reduction is offset by Kepler’s increased core clock speed. And assuming the basic ROPs are unchanged between the two GPU architectures (which there's nothing to indicate otherwise) 32 Kepler ROPs at 980MHz are still faster than 40 Fermi ROPs at 732MHz. The same goes for the memory interfaces-- Fermi's 320-bit memory interface has been replaced with Kepler's 256-bit. Impressively, Nvidia has managed to push this GDDR5 to excessively high frequencies, with the GTX 670's 2GB’s memory running at 6GHz. This means that despite the reduced memory interface, the 670's resulting memory bandwidth is still higher than the GTX 570.

 

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

 

Additionally, the GTX 670 sports a new feature known as Bindless Textures. While previous Nvidia GPUs were restricted to 128 simultaneous textures, Kepler removes that limitation and allows up to 1 million simultaneous textures. Another great Kepler feature is TXAA which stands for Temporal Anti-Aliasing. This technology will be quite a boon for games as it improves the image quality without sacrificing performance. With TXAA, the sampling pattern is spread out over multiple frames. By doing this, the effect is better image quality than even 8x MSAA, but with a performance hit similar to just 2x MSAA. Lastly, Kepler introduces Adaptive Vsync which is basically an intelligent form of vsync. Without vsync, screen tearing can be very distracting, but enabling it locks the refresh rate and hurts performance. Nvidia's Adaptive Vsync ties the frame rate to the refresh rate like traditional vsync until it detects a drop below the standard refresh rate. Then it temporarily disables it until the framerate reaches the standard refresh rate again. Nvidia claims this creates a much smoother overall experience. These hardware improvements make Kepler a compelling purchase, even without the raw performance boost over a GTX 570.

 

Remarkably, the 670 is nearly an inch longer than the 570 it replaces, and as such necessitates that the dual six-pin power connectors be moved from the end of the card to remedy clearance issues. With an Antec 1000 Server case, I've never had to worry about a video card not fitting, but I can certainly see how it might present a problem for smaller enclosures.

In my July 2011 review of the 570, I complained that PNY's installation disk contained drivers that were five-months old. Sadly, the 301.42 drivers included for the 670 were left over from May 24, 2012, nearly ten months ago! I stress this point because updated drivers can make or break a game. For instance, Nvidia rolled out brand new 314.07 drivers optimized specifically for Crysis 3 that improve performance by up to 65%. I can't imagine anyone who pays $400 for a GTX 670 would load the drivers from the disc, but if they do, they are needlessly sacrificing performance. I was hoping at least that the disc included the "A New Dawn" program designed to showcase the abilities of the 670, but I was not so lucky. Instead, I was forced to download the 772 MB demo. Regrettably, the disc looks to be a carbon copy that has been circulating since 2007 with only new drivers added every year or so. Based on my experience with the 570, and now my 670, PNY builds solid hardware. However, the department that cranks out the installation discs is another matter all together.

 

BENCHMARKS

All tests were run on my system which consists of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit with a Core i7 3770 overclocked to 4.0 GHz, GIGABYTE GA-Z77-D3H mainboard, OCZ Fatal1ty 750W power supply, OCZ Vertex 4 SSD and G.Skill 8GB PC1600 DDR3 memory. For both cards, I used the newest 314.07 WHQL drivers from February 18th. Save for Passion Leads Army, all benchmarks were released in February 2013 making them the most current and comprehensive available.

3DMARK 13: It wouldn't be a complete video card test without throwing in 3DMark 13, the newest installment of the world's most popular graphics benchmark. However, the testing methodology is a little different than in years past with a three-tier system that covers everything from mobile devices to laptops to dedicated gaming machines. On the bottom rung is Ice Storm, a DirectX 9 test intended for the most basic hardware such as integrated graphics. Cloud Gate is more advanced with a DirectX 10 feature set designed for a discrete video card. And Fire Strike utilizes next-generation graphics and physics applicable for world-class PCs. In short, Fire Strike is as "Future-Proof" as currently possible and absolutely crippled my 570 with single-digit frame rates. Fortunately, my 670 fared much better with the pyrotechnic benchmark scoring nearly 51% higher.

 

PASSION LEADS ARMY: Released last summer, this is a DirectX 11 Unreal Engine 3 benchmark from Chinese developer Giant IronHorse. It takes the viewer on a whirlwind tour of an ancient oriental city, complete with heavily-tessellated cobblestone walkways and glass storefronts that seemingly explode at random. If there's a message to this demo, it was clearly lost in translation. But like a Godzilla movie, the plot is secondary and the real star is the DX11 eye candy. In fact, the limited benchmark is so good it looks like it came from a North American Triple-A studio and not some communist country situated on the Pacific Rim. Unfortunately, I'm at a loss to explain the slim performance discrepancy between the cards. Both the average and maximum frames per second (FPS) reflect only a meager 20% improvement. As the other benchmarks illustrate, this divide should be closer to 50%. Visually, PLA looks better on the 670 with more realistic lens flare and smoke, but whether this accounts for the missing performance is still unknown.

 

RESIDENT EVIL 6 BENCHMARK: This benchmark is an anomaly in that while I appreciate the complexity of the MT Framework engine, it's a game that I will never play. Gruesome horror shooters such as Dead Island, Dead Space and the Resident Evil series don't appeal to me. That notwithstanding, the graphics are impressive given that Capcom designed this as a straight DX9 title, an obvious nod to its console roots. However, the stress test comes from rendering over 100 zombies on screen at one time in a scene reminiscent of the World War Z trailer. Despite the older API architecture, RE6 at 1920x1080 with FXAA 3HQ drags even the 670 down. Judging by the proprietary score, the 570 is 56% slower here.

 

UNIGINE VALLEY: Released within a week of chief competitor 3DMARK, this new iteration builds on the popularity of its sibling product, Unigine Heaven, with an all-new benchmark. Unlike Heaven's utopia in the clouds, Valley is literally down to earth as it focuses on grasslands and heavily wooded forests where environmental effects such as rain and wind tax even the most powerful video cards. A few times my 570 briefly climbed above the 30 FPS threshold, but overall it recorded just 25.5 FPS at the Extreme HD Preset (1920x1080 8xAA). With the 670 at the same settings, it averaged 38.1 FPS. As a whole, the performance delta between both cards was 56%.

CONCLUSION

A couple weeks after I bought it, I was casually checking some websites when the entire display suddenly blacked out. My first thought was that we'd lost power, but after a few seconds it popped back up with the message "The Nvidia driver driver stopped responding and has recovered". I didn't think much about it until it happened again about five minutes later. At this point, I was beginning to be concerned that I had a faulty new graphics card. Thinking maybe it was a corrupted display driver, I downloaded the latest Beta drivers released the day before. Initially, this seemed to stop the problem until it returned thirty minutes later. Then, as I was deleting the temporary folder created by the beta Nvidia drivers, I noticed a new folder created right around the time I started having problems. I discovered the folder was tied to a running process called IEHighutil.exe. This process was causing my video card to overheat and when it did, it would stop and restart. Unbelievably, I determined it was stealing my GPU cycles for Bitcoin mining using Poclbm, a python-based OpenCL framework that quickly performs the hashing computations. Fortunately, it was simple to remove, but more troubling was how easily it snuck past my three anti-virus programs. The only place I can believe I might have picked it up was when I downloaded the new Tomb Raider game. Incidentally, the Tomb Raider reboot is fantastic, but regrettably arrived too late to be included in the testing.

Coming from a GTX 570, I was concerned that the 670 might be more of a lateral move than a true upgrade. Originally, I had wanted to wait until the new 700 Series was available from Nvidia, but Crysis 3 changed all that. After shelling out $65 for it, I was determined to enjoy it in all its CGI glory. That meant buying a new video card and the PNY GTX 670 fit the bill. Unfortunately, as the benchmarks illustrate, the 670 is not the leap forward I was looking for. The continuing improvements in graphics and image quality have helped nullify the corresponding hardware advances. As such, the perceived progress between video cards becomes less than what we're accustomed to. As with any high-end toy, it all boils down to having to pay if you want to play.