GeForce GTX 690 Review: Dual NVIDIA GK104 GPUs

Name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, May 03, 2012, 08:55 AM EDT

Just Cause 2

DX10.1 Gaming Performance

Just Cause 2

Just Cause 2 was released in March '10, from developers Avalanche Studios and Eidos Interactive. The game makes use of the Avalanche Engine 2.0, an updated version of the similarly named original. It is set on the fictional island of Panau in southeast Asia, and you play the role of Rico Rodriquez. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this article using one of the built-in demo runs called Desert Sunrise. The test results shown here were run at various resolutions and settings. This game also supports a few CUDA-enabled features, but they were left disabled to keep the playing field level.

The GeForce GTX 690 continues to dominate every other single graphics card currently available in the Just Cause 2 benchmark. From here on out though, we've got SLI and CrossFire scores as well, which will level the playing field considerably, in terms of price and performance.

Versus a pair of GeForce GTX 680 cards running in SLI mode or a pair of Radeon HD 7970 cards running in CrossFire mode, the GeForce GTX 690's performance fall right in between the two. The GeForce GTX 590 quad-SLI setup doesn't scale properly in this game and as a result it fall behind a bit.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, Gaming, DirectX, graphics, GTX-690

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com