 3D vision one of Nvidia's marquee technology so to go along with the GeForce GTX 680 launch here I've got my galaxy GeForce GTX 680 I can remove the glasses so you guys can see what the card looks like if you haven't already seen my regular performance review or my unboxing and the focus of this video is going to be on 3D vision so what differentiates 3D vision from its competitors first and foremost is the fact that it uses the Nvidia ecosystem so you get a 3D vision certified display in this case I'm using the VG236H monitor from Asus honestly if you're buying a 3D vision setup today I would definitely recommend going with one of the newer monitors with light boost whether it's the BenQ 2420T or the Asus 27-inch I can't remember the model of it but it has light boost light boost makes all the difference in the world whether you're using gen 2 glasses the ones that look like this or generation 1 glasses it definitely reduces headaches reduces crosstalk between the two images and provides a much brighter more immersive 3D experience so there's advantage number one is you got the Nvidia ecosystem that is the Nvidia graphics card the Nvidia certified monitor and the Nvidia glasses means that everything works together there's no guesswork involved there seems to be a lot of confusion about AMD's HD 3D and that is for good reason I've tried on a couple occasions to get AMD HD 3D working correctly and it can be a bit of a bear so for one it only works correctly over display port meaning there's only I think about two monitors on the market that support it out of the box and number two is you have to get 3D inserting middleware whereas Nvidia is actually doing the work of putting in the driver profiles putting in the setup wizard and getting you going in a fairly seamless manner so what are we comparing since we can't compare any AMD cards because it'd be hard to do apples to apples I want to compare the latest generation GTX 680 against its last generation equivalent the GTX 580 I also want to compare it against the GTX 570 just so you guys have another point of reference and finally against the GTX 590 that is the ruler of the roost from the last generation that is basically dual something between these two because it's got the same number of CUDA cores as a 580 but it's actually clocked about like a 570 so that's that's that graphics card so the 680 oh yeah so 3d why do we need more power for 3d well for one thing let's start I've actually already run all of the tests for this one so I've pretty much got them here but let's take a look first at a case study of the GTX 580 so in this case I'm going to highlight the GTX 580 row for regular and then the GTX 580 row for 3d vision okay so in terms of average frame rates we see it requires about double the processing power in all scenarios minimum maximum and average in order to enable 3d vision we get half the frame rate crisis 2 we're going to see a very different scenario where actually 3d vision doesn't give it that much of a hit which is something that crisis 2 is actually designed for with the Witcher we see this scenario again where it takes about double the processing power remember it's rendering the scene from this angle and then from this angle and then using the glasses to show only the correct the correctly angled scene to each of your eyes to give you that 3d effect next Batman Arkham City we see once again a huge performance hit for enabling 3d vision and finally with Skyrim we see the same thing where it takes about double the processing power so that is one big reason why stereoscopic 3d gaming enthusiasts might go with something like a GTX 680 over a last generation card because that you can actually see I'm going to highlight the GTX 680 with a green color for new Nvidia cards okay so the 680 actually performs across the board almost on par or better or sort of a little bit lesser or a little bit better than the last generation GTX 590 which if you guys recall is pretty much equivalent to 2 GTX 570s or 580s somewhere in between that so that puts it a clear double the performance of the 580 here in Battlefield 3 double the performance of the 580 here in crisis 2 more than double the performance in the Witcher 2 please note 20 FPS is not playable you'll have to dial back the detail levels one way or another this is just giving us the relative performance in a GPU bound scenario next we've got a significant improvement although not nearly as huge as some of the ones we've seen before so 60 from 40 for the GTX 680 versus the 580 and finally in Skyrim we see yet another doubling of performance so while the regular performance numbers showed the GTX 680 definitely beating the GTX 580 do here actually yeah I guess it's pretty much close to double across the board maybe I should have looked more closely at these yeah okay oh okay that man Arkham City not so much but ha but then again not so much so okay what we've learned is that if you throw more processing power at it in this case the GTX 680 over the previous generation GTX 580 remember this is clocked at 1 gigahertz and that is a flexible clock speed using GPU boost it'll actually scale itself up in scenarios where it's not using as much power with 2 gigs of 6 gigahertz clocked memory this is using a new 28 nanometer process it consumes significantly less power than the last generation GTX 580 so you can see here oh no no sorry not not against the GTX 580 but against the GTX 590 which is closer to it in terms of performance so you're saving as much as a hundred to a hundred and fifty watts under load across the board compared to a 590 and getting similar performance getting similar power consumption to the 580 and just blowing it out of the water in terms of performance especially as you guys can see in 3d vision so if you want a game in stereoscopic 3d a GeForce GTX 680 is probably not a bad choice and thanks to Galaxy for providing the GTX 680 that I use to run these benchmarks don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and oh wow I almost forgot to mention that yes the 680 is the first graphics card from Nvidia to support 3d vision surround off a single card so using display port and then dual DVI's you can actually run three displays in 3d vision in surround mode off a single card and I shouldn't say it's the first because technically the 590 supports it because that one has dual GPUs to power its three DVI ports but it is the first single GPU card that not only supports 3d vision but also supports 3d vision surround off a single card