Feature Articles

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 - Gaining Momentum, Building Steam

By Kenny Yeo - 10 May 2012

3DMark 11 and Battlefield Bad Company 2 Results

3DMark 11 Results

We begin our analysis of the new GeForce GTX 670 with the very popular 3DMark 11 benchmark. The latest iteration of FutureMark’s benchmarking utility makes extensive use of all DirectX 11 features such as tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading, making it a good gauge of a card’s performance.

The reference GeForce GTX 670 scored 8198 and 2894 3DMarks on the Performance and Extreme preset respectively. These figures completely trounces the Radeon HD 7950’s equivalent score of 6641 and 2247 3DMarks by over 20%. It even managed to edge out the Radeon HD 7970, which scored 7659 and 2689 3DMarks. The flagship GeForce GTX 680 still reigned supreme as far as single GPU cards are concerned.

The two customized GeForce GTX 670 cards from ASUS and Palit both did pretty well, posting higher scores than the reference card from NVIDIA, as expected. The ASUS GTX 670 DirectCU II TOP, in particular, scored even higher than the GeForce GTX 680.

Using EVGA’s PrecisionX overclocking utility, we can clearly see NVIDIA’s GPU Boost technology at work as the card ramped up its speeds whenever the test ran proper, and toned down in the intervals when the tests were loading. More impressively, the card peaked at 1097MHz, more than 100MHz above its default boost clock speed, showing just how adaptive and intelligent GPU Boost technology is.

 

Battlefield Bad Company 2 Results

Next, we move on to Battlefield Bad Company 2, one of the earliest DirectX 11 first-person shooters. The GeForce GTX 670 turned in a brilliant performance, once again comfortably seeing off its direct competitor, the Radeon HD 7950 by at least 30% across all resolutions. It was even quicker than the Radeon HD 7970 as well, by around 15% overall. Compared to previous generation NVIDIA cards, the GeForce GTX 670 was miles ahead of the GeForce GTX 580 and only slightly off the pace when compared against the dual-GPU GeForce GTX 590.

The two customized cards performed well here as well. The ASUS GTX 670 DirectCU II TOP was marginally quicker, which was to be expected given its slightly higher clock speeds, and was almost on a par with the current single GPU speed king, the GeForce GTX 680. 

 

Here we noticed that the GeForce GTX 670 once again ramped up beyond its default boost clock speed of 980MHz by recording a peak clock speed of 1097MHz. This is yet another clear indication of the effectiveness of NVIDIA’s GPU Boost technology.

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.