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680MX Benchmarks please

dogbone66 said:
Mac 32

thanks. yea, I know what you mean regarding actually activating Afterburner, funny because i kind of figured you might ask me that, but i did hit the "apply" button. I do have the fusion drive. Playing Black Ops, the game stays in the 75 degree range. But the two big sandbox games I play, DayZ and Plantetside 2, the system heats up pretty high, pretty fast. I'm going to play around with AA and shadows as you suggested to see what i can do. I did have the nVidia vertical sync and triple buffering on, wonder if that made any difference.

So with Lubbos, do you just have your fans running at 2400rpm all the time? because even while just internet surfing the fans were running. I couldn't turn lubbos off, couldn't delete Lubbos, when I tried to delete a dialog box said it was in use even though i had closed the window. Once i restarted the computer then the fans went back to normal and I was allowed to delete the program. I'll try it again.

Thanks.
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Well at 250/375 Crysis 3 stays pretty much around 80-83C when gaming for several hours. I doubt any game heats up the iMac more than Crysis 3. :p Fan speed depends on the game and your ambient temperature, but I use 2500rpm in Crysis/Far Cry3, 2200 in Bioshock Infinite and 1500-2000rpm in older games.
You have to find the Lubbos icon in the Windows taskbar, right click on "exit". Then Lubbos will turn completely off. Otherwise just turn down fan speed in Lubbos after your done gaming (to 1200rpm).
Btw. at +285/+425 680MX scores higher than a GTX670 at default clock speed in 3dmark11. :)
 
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mac 32 thanks,

Just to be clear, when you post the afterburner number 285/425, you mean Core Clock 285/memory Clock 425, correct? Core clock speed first followed by memory clock. .

regarding lubbos, The window closes, but the fans are still under the influence of lubbos. I closed it via the task bar, I clicked it away, and the fans were still running. So I deleted the configuration settings just to see and the fans took off to 6000rpm (Lubbos default) so I had to quickly open Lubbos and change the settings to get the fans under control.
 
dogbone66 said:
mac 32 thanks,

Just to be clear, when you post the afterburner number 285/425, you mean Core Clock 285/memory Clock 425, correct? Core clock speed first followed by memory clock. .

regarding lubbos, The window closes, but the fans are still under the influence of lubbos. I closed it via the task bar, I clicked it away, and the fans were still running. So I deleted the configuration settings just to see and the fans took off to 6000rpm (Lubbos default) so I had to quickly open Lubbos and change the settings to get the fans under control.
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Yes, gpu core 285 gpu ram 425. :) I never have the fans go up to 6000rpm. I just set them to 1200 after I!m done gaming. You can choose max and mim temp. Over and under that the default iMac fan control takes over. PS: Don't overclock more than necessary, if you're playing an older game, maybe overclocking isn't necessary. If you do overclcock at 285/425, watch the iMacs temps carefully,as your iMac might be different than mine. I use WinInfo64, and MSI Afterburner. You need to keep an eye esp. on hard drive temp. If the hard drive is getting up to 60C, that's too high. Be careful when overclocking.
 
So I keep benching in Planetside 2 because it's the most demanding game I'm playing right now, but the nature of the game makes precise comparisons difficult, not moot, but not perfect. I still think it gives some useful information. The battles can change very quickly dropping the number of players, ships, tanks, explosions, etc, changing the demand on the system quickly. Nonetheless, I have few numbers.

So Planetside 2 all graphic settings on high was running my GPU temp in game constantly between between 89 and 90 (not running afterburner) Playing the game on medium graphic settings kept the temp at 85.

Running afterburner 285/424 all graphics settings in PS2 on high, pushed the temp up to a constant, in game temp of 93. Running Lubbos at 2600rpm dropped that temp down to 91.

The FPS increase from overclocking, according to Frapps, was an average increase of 5 fps. Not running frapps but just eyeballing the on screen, ingame FPS I'd estimate maybe at most a 10 fps increase. I could feel the difference, but it wasn't a "big" difference.

so overcloacking increases temps 4 degree, gives 5-10 frams per second increase, and Lubbos dropped the temp 2 degrees.

All these numbers varied depending on where in the map I was playing, how many people were in the fight with me, how many airships etc. The temps listed above were the highest I encountered, although the lowest were only a few degrees lower.
 
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Updating my last post, more playing around with Afterburner and Planteside 2, looks like overclocking (285/424) heated up my GPU in PS2 by 8 degrees, and Lubbos at 2600 rpm dropped the temp by 2 degrees.

No over clocking = 85 degrees, with overclocking = 93 degrees. Overclocking with Lubbos fan control at 2600 rpm = 91 degrees. Frame rate increase from overclocking according to Frapps, an average increase of 5 fps, and a max increase of 8-10 fps.

Is that enough of an increase in FPS to warrant heating up the GPU by 8 degrees or with Lubbos 6 degrees? I dont know.
 
dogbone66 said:
Updating my last post, more playing around with Afterburner and Planteside 2, looks like overclocking (285/424) heated up my GPU in PS2 by 8 degrees, and Lubbos at 2600 rpm dropped the temp by 2 degrees.

No over clocking = 85 degrees, with overclocking = 93 degrees. Overclocking with Lubbos fan control at 2600 rpm = 91 degrees. Frame rate increase from overclocking according to Frapps, an average increase of 5 fps, and a max increase of 8-10 fps.

Is that enough of an increase in FPS to warrant heating up the GPU by 8 degrees or with Lubbos 6 degrees? I dont know.
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Hmm, I've never gotten 93C. I can get rare occational spikes up to 85C while playing Crysis1 at 285/425, or Crysis3 at 250/375 - fanspeed at 2500rpm. You have to compare the original fps amount. If you increase your average framerate from 28 to 35, then that's a big difference, 55 to 60 not so much. You also have to be smart about what graphics settings you use. Certain settings can cripple the GPU, like AA in 2560x1440, shader and shadow quality at max etc. Again: It makes no sense using AA in new games, you will just cripple your framerate for minimal visual gains. Using AAx4 in Half-Life 2 makes sense, but in Far Cry 3, Crysis..nope.
 
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Yea, the average FPS in PS2 varied a lot. But one comparison, same battle, same area of the map, the average FPS went from 38 to 43 (with overclocking). Another similar comparison went from 48 to 54. Max fps going from 63 to 73 in one case, (not average but max fps). All this is with all setting on high except for shadows, on medium.

In black ops the average temp was 75 (no over clocking) and in PS2 the average with no oaverclocking is 85. DayZ (which is a mod for Arma 2) the temp with no overclocking is also 85. So those are the base temps. Overclocking adds around 8 degrees to the base temps, and Lubbos is not helping that much, at least in PS2. By the way, all this is with turbo boost disabled, per Mac 32's instructions.

SO I'm assuming this has to do with the large sandbox environment in PS2 and DayZ. So Crysis may have outrageous graphics, but the size of the area is what's taxing the system in PS2. It's not like, BF3 or COD, Battlefield 3‘s Caspian Border is 2.21sqkm. Just one of Planetside 2‘s continents is 64sqkm. DayZ is 184 sqkm.
 
dogbone66 said:
Yea, the average FPS in PS2 varied a lot. But one comparison, same battle, same area of the map, the average FPS went from 38 to 43 (with overclocking). Another similar comparison went from 48 to 54. Max fps going from 63 to 73 in one case, (not average but max fps). All this is with all setting on high except for shadows, on medium.

In black ops the average temp was 75 (no over clocking) and in PS2 the average with no oaverclocking is 85. DayZ (which is a mod for Arma 2) the temp with no overclocking is also 85. So those are the base temps. Overclocking adds around 8 degrees to the base temps, and Lubbos is not helping that much, at least in PS2. By the way, all this is with turbo boost disabled, per Mac 32's instructions.

SO I'm assuming this has to do with the large sandbox environment in PS2 and DayZ. So Crysis may have outrageous graphics, but the size of the area is what's taxing the system in PS2. It's not like, BF3 or COD, Battlefield 3‘s Caspian Border is 2.21sqkm. Just one of Planetside 2‘s continents is 64sqkm. DayZ is 184 sqkm.
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Hmm, some of the levels in Crysis 1 are HUGE. There's a reason why people bitched about Crysis 2 and 3 when those games were relased... :p I've also modded Crysis 1 with more advance shaders and textures. Crysis 1 properly modded looks nearly as good as Crysis 3, in other words...simply amazing. :) I'm guessing here, but maybe the hard drive is the culprit. A big 7200rpm hard drive does generate quite a bit of heat. That's one of the reasons I've stopped buying computers with hard drives. Btw., here in Norway it's spring and a mild climate. If you live somewhere with scorching heat, obviously the iMac will get hotter... That's it, I'm out of more ideas why you get so high temps. Maybe the application of cooling paste at the Apple factory varies unit to unit, or your 680MX unit has less headroom for overclocking.
 
Do you have the fusion drive or flash memory? It seems to me at the time I bought my mac I had read somewhere the Fusion drive didn't work with Bootcamp. Obviously that has changed since then, but I think that was one of the reasons I didn't select that option. You're probably right, the HD is likely the culprit for the higher temps.

I must quibble a little bit on map size, I played Crysis, campaign and multiplayer, and as large as those maps are, they are nowhere near 64 square kilometers. Planetside 2 is an entire continent, with battles going on all over the continent. It would take an hour (or more) to travel from one side of the map to the other side. Same with Dayz, it's at least one and a half hours of running to get from one side of the map to the other. Insanely large areas.

I've got to look into those Crysis mods, sounds pretty cool. Thanks.
 
WilliamG said:
One person's playable is another person's unplayable. Without frame-rate info, anyone replying here isn't doing you any favors.
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?:confused:

There's only so many configurations available for the iMac/680mx. I think it would be easy enough to figure out a baseline.
 
dogbone66 said:
Don't know if anyone saw this, but Nvidia came out with a 680 mac edition
http://www.barefeats.com/gpu680v.html
Looks like it smokes the 680mx iMac.
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No surprises, there. :) It's a huge desktop card!

Honestly, while it's always fun to have a super-powerful graphics card, I have pretty much no complaints about the 680 in the iMac. It's just fantastic. That said, I think a lot of the reason it feels fantastic is that graphics have been held back by the consoles. I look at e.g. Fifa 13, and think to myself that while yes - it runs at 60fps at 2560x1440 with no issues, the only reason it does is because, like pretty much every game on the PC, it's a port, designed to run on hardware released in 2005! 2005!!! Can you believe the XBOX 360 will be eight years old this year?

There's a reason Max Payne 3 doesn't run at 60fps (or even close to it) at 2560x1440 on the 680 iMac card, and that's because it wasn't a port, and Rockstar really did make it look damn good compared to the consoles (hence the 30GB install size due to textures/audio that are leagues beyond the 360/PS3 graphics).

When the next-gen consoles come out and lol all over our iMacs, we'll start to see some real graphics that tax our iMacs more, and then we'll want more. This was a good time for Apple to release a seemingly powerful iMac, because it FEELS so powerful because it's up against 7+year-old consoles!
 
I think the 680mx memory is rated much higher than what it is clocked at, perhaps even the same memory as the desktop 680.

I'm at +225mhz core and +500mhz memory, GPU-Z confirms my memory is running at 6000mhz which is what the desktop GTX 680 is rated at.. Anyone have any insights into this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_600_Series
 
WilliamG said:
No surprises, there. :) It's a huge desktop card!

Honestly, while it's always fun to have a super-powerful graphics card, I have pretty much no complaints about the 680 in the iMac. It's just fantastic. That said, I think a lot of the reason it feels fantastic is that graphics have been held back by the consoles. I look at e.g. Fifa 13, and think to myself that while yes - it runs at 60fps at 2560x1440 with no issues, the only reason it does is because, like pretty much every game on the PC, it's a port, designed to run on hardware released in 2005! 2005!!! Can you believe the XBOX 360 will be eight years old this year?

There's a reason Max Payne 3 doesn't run at 60fps (or even close to it) at 2560x1440 on the 680 iMac card, and that's because it wasn't a port, and Rockstar really did make it look damn good compared to the consoles (hence the 30GB install size due to textures/audio that are leagues beyond the 360/PS3 graphics).

When the next-gen consoles come out and lol all over our iMacs, we'll start to see some real graphics that tax our iMacs more, and then we'll want more. This was a good time for Apple to release a seemingly powerful iMac, because it FEELS so powerful because it's up against 7+year-old consoles!
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Being realistic, the gaming industry is already suffering from very high development costs, so I think we're not going to see a huge difference just because we get a new console generation. I hope/think an equally important improvement will be more open-ended/deeper games and bigger levels (like Crysis 1 and STALKER), as well as more detailed textues - because of more ram. Look at the latest Crytech engine with Crysis 3, it looks great at both very high, high and medium settings. It's primarily the latest shadow and shader technologies that make our current gen gfx cards struggle. In most games, all you need to do is go down one step (or two) in the gfx settings, and you got nearly identical visuals but much better framerates. Far Cry 3 seems unecessarily demanding in this area IMO. There is just no going around inefficient coding (Metro 2033 being an obvious example).

Remember also that 120hz is quickly becoming the standard for serious gamers, which needs more powerful gfx cards to deliver consistantly high framerates. Using Nvidia lightboost technology in 2D at near 120hz is supposed to give an image quality in gaming almost identical to the old CRT screen (ie. nearly eliminating motion blur).
 
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Do these games run on Mountain Lion or do I need to install Windows?


First time gaming on an iMac, I just bought the top of the line model for Video editing and Motion graphics, but maybe I can play a cool game on some time in between renders.


I have the 2gb graphics card with 3.4ghz i7 27" iMac.

thanks
 
I've seen a lot of people mentioning that it's a good idea to disable Turbo Boost on the 3.4GHz i7 when gaming. I tried this yesterday in Windows 8 by setting the max CPU speed to 99%. It did indeed lower the temperatures between 5 and 10 degrees. I presume there's no hit on performance here because the games don't need that extra speed on an already powerful CPU, right? I've not had any issues with overheating but I figured it might be a good idea to increase the fan a little anyway. What's a good speed (non-overclocked system) for playing? Something like 2000rpm as opposed to the minimum 1200rpm? Thanks.
 
Question for the panel. If we overclock and run Lubbos and our Video card and/or fan dies prematurely, would repair be provided under Apple Care? My guess is technically no, but how would Apple know the problem was caused by overclocking and/or running Lubbos? Or are there ways for Apple to determine this?
 
Turbo boost
so I have question on disabling it. Am I in the correct place? Windows 7. Control panel, power options, change plan settings, change advanced power settings, then a separate smaller window pops out named power options. There are a list of option to choose from in this smaller window, Desktop background settings, wireless adapter settings, sleep, USB settings, etc. Towards the bottom of this list is the processor power management. Click on this and three option are available. "Minimum processor state," "system cooling policy" and "maximum processor state." Change "Maximum processor state" to 99% from 100.

If that is correct, there was no change in temperature playing a few different games.

Thanks.
 
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Direct 3D overrider. Finally tried that and it works pretty good. Most of the games I've been playing lately tearing hasn't been a problem except for Black Ops and Blacklight Retribution. In BLR, tearing is so bad the game is almost unplayable, but D3D Overrider reduces it, I'd say by 80-90%. Difference is night and day, same with black ops.

Lots of great info here everyone, thanks.
 
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