Gainward articles

Nvidia continues to roll out the GeForce 700 series this week with the GTX 760 – the generation's first truly mainstream product at $250. In other words, the GTX 760 has the potential to be today's most relevant option for someone who needs a new graphics card.

Assuming Nvidia doesn't throw us a curve ball, we expect the GTX 760 to deliver performance comparable to that of the HD 7950 with a price tag that's closer to HD 7870s – a situation that would invariably benefit anyone shopping for a mid-range GPU.

Having taken the covers off the GeForce GTX 780 a week ago, Nvidia is ready to release their next part in the GeForce 700 series. Earlier rumors indicated that the GeForce GTX 770's specifications would be much like a GTX 680 on steroids, and as it turns out that's exactly what it is.

The GTX 770 features the fastest GDDR5 memory we have ever seen at 7GHz. Memory at that clock rate is good for a peak bandwidth of 224GB/s, 16% more than the GTX 680. Therefore, technically if you could overclock a GTX 680 well enough you could create a GTX 770.

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...