After teasing
us for most of last week, NVIDIA has finally launched its GeForce GTX 690, a
graphics card powered by two GPUs based on the “Kepler” architecture. The new
card was announced at an odd hour in the USA, but that’s because Jen-Hsun Huang
(NVIDIA’s CEO) presented it in Shanghai, China.
Now, you
finally get to see the card in all its glory, and NVIDIA is rather proud of the
reference design, which uses thixomolded magnesium alloy (instead of plastic)
for the fan housing because this material provides better heat dissipation.
Like previous designs, the heat sink uses vapor chambers, which is not too much
to help cool the “beast”.
In ideal
conditions, the GeForce GTX 690 should perform close to 2X faster than the
GeForce GTX 680, but in reality, performance does not scale linearly with the
number of GPUs. If you have a specific game in mind, wait for the independent
benchmarks, but most likely, you will be able to crank the resolution and image
quality to the maximum settings. All in all, the GeForce GTX 690 embarks 3072
CUDA cores, which are basic processing building blocks. But that’s not it, you
can pair two GeForce GTX 690 to achieve a -mind blowing- total of 6144 CUDA
cores.
The card
should be available “by May 7″, “in limited quantities”, says NVIDIA. You can
expect NVIDIA’s closest partners to have those “bragging rights” cards, namely
(but not limited to) ASUS, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Inno3D, MSI, Palit
and Zotac. Finally, the card may be the fastest in the world, but it won’t come
for cheap, the price is $999, which seems to be the price for the ultimate
graphics experience of the moment.
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