Inno3D iChill GeForce GTX 680 Black Series Accelero Hybrid 4GB Video Card Review

Testing – Demos
After the benchmarking suites comes some effective gauging of real-world performance: benchmarking tools using real games, or at least, technology present in games.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R
First up, S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat and S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky. These two tools utilize DX11 and DX10 respectively, though Clear Sky, the DX10 version, is actually tougher on your video hardware than Call of Pripyat, it’s DX11 counterpart.

For Call of Pripyat, we use the Ultra preset, DX11, 1920×1080 resolution, MSAA 4x, SSAO: HBAO, with Tessellation enabled.

stalker1

For Clear Sky, we use the Ultra Preset, DX10.1, 1920×1080 resolution, MSAA 4x, with Alpha AA 10.1 (High).

stalker2

Alien Vs. Predator
Our next demo benchmark is Alien Vs. Predator. Using DirectX11 and high quality textures, combined with ambient occlusion, tessellation and hardware-intensive anti-aliasing, it utilizes much of what your GPU can do in order to test your hardware effectively.

When configuring Alien Vs. Predator, we used the following settings: Resolution: 1920×1080, Textures: Very High, Shadows: High, Anisotropic Filtering: 16x, SSAO: On, Tessellation: On, DX11 Advanced Shadows: On, MSAA: 4x.

Unigine Heaven
Unigine Heaven is an extremely popular tool for measuring GPU performance. It’s free and used in almost every hardware test you’ll have seen in the last 2 years, omitting it simply isn’t an option.

Using DX11, 8x Anti-Aliasing, 16x Anisotropy and Extreme Tessellation, we made sure we maxed Heaven out when it came to putting the 680 to the test.

Stone Giant
A tool similar to heaven but utilizing the DX11 technologies in a different manner is Stone Giant. Created to show that advanced geometry can be used to create mind-blowingly awesome creatures and landscapes, Stone Giant – much like heaven – utilizes your hardware effectively and pushes it, providing you with FPS information once the run finishes.  The settings that were used were: Resolution: 1920×1080, Tessellation: High, Aspect Ratio: 16:9.

We put all 3 (Alien vs. Predator, Heaven and Stone Giant) in one easy to read graph.

demos