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.