NVIDIA's Kepler Benchmarked, Released

Last August, it was reported that NVIDIA’s highly-anticipated Kepler graphics cards would be delayed until 2012. Well, the delay is finally over and they have been released. There are now benchmarks all over the internet, and it’s looking good.

At first glance it seems like the GeForce GTX 680, the reference card for the Kepler platform, beats AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 Black Edition in both performance and price. That seems to hold up throughout the benchmarks, except for a few.

AMD’s offering in this price range (around the $500-$600 mark) only beat the GTX 680 in Just Cause 2and Metro 2033 framerates, according to Maximum PC’s benchmarks. In HardOCP’s benchmarks, the Radeon HD 7970 beat the GTX 680 in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Mass Effect 3, and Batman: Arkham Cityframerate tests.

Between the two websites’ benchmarks, the biggest discrepancy was in the amount of power they claimed each card uses. HardOCP’s benchmarks had a much closer power draw between the GTX 680 and Radeon HD 7970, while Maximum PC’s benchmarks placed the GTX 680 way ahead in both idle and load draws.

You can read Maximum PC’s review here, and HardOCP’s review here. All the images except for the NVIDIA logo were taken from Maximum PC. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 is available now (if you can find it in stock) from the usual places for ~$499.99. At the time of writing it is out of stock at Newegg, so be sure to hit “auto-notify” if you want to get one.