Introduction

NVIDIA made the surprise announcement of GeForce GTX 690 launch last weekend. A little later, we found ourselves opening a classy wooden crate with a crowbar NVIDIA sent a little earlier, in it was the GeForce GTX 690. The GTX 690 is NVIDIA's quest for absolute performance leadership in the graphics processor market. Despite being months behind AMD in launching its 28 nm Kepler GPU lineup, NVIDIA caught up with it, in the performance segment, with the GeForce GTX 680, and now it seeks to settle the disputed absolute performance lead between GeForce GTX 590 and Radeon HD 6990, with the new GeForce GTX 690.

In more ways than one, this launch is an assertion of NVIDIA's technological leadership, because AMD still hasn't launched its enthusiast-segment dual-GPU graphics card, yet, and one can't expect it to be out before June. The GeForce GTX 690 is a dual-GPU graphics card with two 28 nm GK104 GPUs, the same chips found in the GeForce GTX 680. The two chips each are clocked slightly lower than GeForce GTX 680, and rely on a PCI-Express 3.0 bridge chip for bus interface, however, NVIDIA claims that GTX 690 should provide performance comparable to GeForce GTX 680 2-way SLI. The card also costs the same as two GTX 680s, at US $999. Which makes it the most expensive reference design graphics card ever released.



The GTX 690 has two GK104 Kepler GPUs arranged in an internal SLI configuration. Each GK104 chip has all its components enabled, including 1,536 CUDA cores, 128 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and four independent geometry processing units. Each GPU further has a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, with which it talks to 2 GB of memory. The total memory on the card, hence is 4 GB. In this GeForce GTX 690 review, we verify NVIDIA's performance claims (of it matching 2x GeForce GTX 680), because that is key to ascertaining whether the card is worth $999, or if NVIDIA is already having the spoils of war.