After months of talking up its latest architecture, Nvidia reclaimed the single-GPU performance crown with its GeForce GTX 680, which outpaced the Radeon HD 7970 by about 7% in our tests. Kepler's arrival forced AMD to slash prices across its Southern Islands lineup.

The HD 7950 took a $60 cut to $399, making it one of the most tempting 7000 series cards because it has no equal -- or had no equal, we should say. Continuing Kepler's rollout, Nvidia has unveiled the GTX 670, which is priced against the HD 7950 at $399. Despite being $100 cheaper than the GTX 680, the GTX 670 doesn't appear to be much slower on paper, and that could spell disaster for AMD.

On paper, the GTX 680 has almost 200% more shader performance than the GTX 580, roughly 250% more texture performance, 90% more ROP performance and 100% more memory bandwidth. With the Radeon HD 7970 only being ~9% faster than the GTX 580, AMD appears to have priced itself into a corner this time around.

Because we didn't get a reference sample last month, our GTX 680 review will showcase one of the special edition products instead, meet the Gainward GTX 680 Phantom...