GeForce GTX 690 

From a gaming performance perspective we haven’t seen a dual-GPU card reach the performance of a pair of high-end cards in SLI/CF since the Radeon HD 4870X2 in 2008, so it’s quite refreshing to see someone get so close again 4 years later.

As a $999 card it doesn’t double the performance of the $499 GTX 680, but SLI has never offered quite that much of a performance boost.

The GTX 690 doesn’t quite reach the performance of the GTX 680 SLI, but it’s very, very close.

When SLI works the GTX 690 is the fastest card out there, and when SLI doesn’t work the GTX 690 is still the fastest card out there.

NVIDIA told us that they could break this tradition and put two full GTX 680s on a single card, and that they could do that while making it quieter and less power consuming than a dual video card SLI setup.

I don’t believe there’s any argument to be had with respect to whether the GTX 690 is worth getting over the GTX 680 SLI, as we’ve clearly answered that above.

We also found that additional manual overclocking is possible, which provided an extra 14% performance boost in real gaming.

For the first time in a long time using a dual-GPU card doesn’t mean sacrificing single-GPU performance, and that’s a game changer.

For most situations the GTX 690 is going to be the way to go thanks to its lower power consumption and lower noise levels, but for cases that need fully exhausting video cards the GTX 680 SLI can offer the same gaming performance at the same price.

Power consumption during gaming is simply outstanding.

When compared to the dual card GTX 680 SLI setup we see significantly reduced power consumption, which is a key factor in engineering a successful dual GPU card as the limiting factors in this scenario are power draw and heat density.

More often than not they have to sacrifice a significant amount of single-GPU performance in order to put two GPUs on a single card, and in the rare occasions where that tradeoff doesn’t happen there’s some other tradeoff such as a loud cooler or immense power consumption.

Unfortunately we’re going to have to put AMD out of the running here; as we’ve seen in games like Crysis and Metro the 7970 in Crossfire has a great deal of potential, but as it stands Crossfire is simply too broken overall to recommend.

I seriously doubt that they can match the whole package that NVIDIA offers with the GeForce GTX 690, so the only hope is that the HD 7990 will bring some price competition to the ultra-high end gaming segment.