![]() ![]() Unlike the fully unlocked GeForce GTX 680, which uses the same GPU but has all 1536 shaders enabled, NVIDIA has disabled some shading units on the GeForce GTX 670 to reach the product's target shader count. The GK104 graphics processor is an average sized chip with a die area of 294 mm² and 3,540 million transistors. Even though it supports DirectX 12, the feature level is only 11_0, which can be problematic with newer DirectX 12 titles. Built on the 28 nm process, and based on the GK104 graphics processor, in its GK104-325-A2 variant, the card supports DirectX 12. You can expect to see some small form factor designs, with different coolers, coming our way soon.The GeForce GTX 670 was a high-end graphics card by NVIDIA, launched on May 10th, 2012. This reference design card has taken up this space with the same GPU cooler as chills the heart of the GTX 680, but the PCB itself stops short of the fan. That pushes it close to the bracket side of the board and has created a great deal of space at the end of the card. The big change has been to move the power circuitry to the 'west' side of the chip. That should mean we ought to see some interesting designs from the add-in board (AIB) manufacturers at launch, with overclocked cards here, like the Zotac GTX 670 AMP! edition. Nvidia has also redesigned the PCB layout too – and is allowing card manufacturers to create their own designs from the get go too. While the clockspeed is a way short of the 1GHz mark the Nvidia GTX 680 was sporting, in the games across our benchmarking suite the Nvidia GTX 670 happily ran at over 1,058MHz. Nvidia has been very open about the fact it is standing on the CPU company's shoulders on this one.īut take nothing away from Nvidia, making the GPU clockspeed dynamic on a per second basis is thoroughly impressive and enables the card to take advantage of the massive amount of overclocking headroom most GPUs have been born with in the last few generations. Well, the real big news is down to the Intel Turbo Boost-aping GPU Boost. Other than the clockspeed, and the sheer number of them though, the CUDA cores in Kepler are identical to the ones that we've had in Fermi for years.Īs well as the new SMX modules then, what else does Kepler do differently? It's this exponential rise in core count that eases any speed issues that would have otherwise arose in making the CUDA cores run at half the speed they were in Fermi. With the change in production process to 28nm transistors in Kepler the core count per redesigned SMX has risen dramatically to 192.įrom the Nvidia GTX 570 to this GTX 670 then that's a massive 180% increase in CUDA cores. With only 32 CUDA cores per SM that made sense. That meant that for the relatively limited number of CUDA cores it was cramming into its Streaming Microprocessors (SM) it could squeeze out as much performance as possible. Note the cut down PCB should be good for teeny AIB versions In previous generations Nvidia had been running the shader clock at twice the speed of the GPU itself. One of the key differences between the Kepler and Fermi graphics architectures is the now unified shader and GPU clock. That means it is running with 7 SMX modules making a total of 1,344 CUDA cores running around inside it. The GTX 670 is running the exact same GK104 GPU as the GTX 680, but with one of the new SMX modules chopped out. When Nvidia says it is using the same DNA as the Nvidia GTX 680 for the GTX 670 it's not just trying to hang on the coat-tails of the current top-end single-GPU card. So then, what sits on that redesigned circuit board? The GTX 660 though is likely to come with a new GPU spin, not just the slightly chopped down GK104 GPU that sits at the heart of the Nvidia GTX 670 and its redesigned PCB. This GTX 670 is aiming squarely at the market currently inhabited by the AMD Radeon HD 7950, so we're talking about a £330/$400 graphics card here. With the Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 that's exactly what we've found ourselves facing.Īt its heart is the same GPU that powered the first Kepler card, and as Nvidia puts it, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 is "built from the DNA of the GTX 680".īut we're still not calling this the real mainstream Kepler card, that will come in the shape of the GTX 660 that is yet to come. So a cut-down version of the GTX 680 is what we've been after, and what we've known was coming, since Kepler first fired up in our test bench. ![]()
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