The idea of a $1,000 graphics card sounds fairly insane. Arguably, it's spectacles like the new GeForce GTX 690 that give people the idea that PC gaming is prohibitively expensive. But at the same time, it is kind of awesome when Nvidia unveils a brand new dual-GPU card that blows everything else out of the water. Think of this as a glimpse a year or two into the future, when this level of performance will come down to a price that's within the reach of non-lotto winners.
According to Nvidia's charts (which are always slightly suspect), the GTX 690 is capable of running The Witcher 2 at 2560x1600 with 16xAF and maximum settings at over 60 frames per second, and Skyrim at the same settings at 130fps. I'm not sure exactly how they're measuring that, since neither game has a standardized benchmarking tool, but it's still damn impressive. Nvidia claims the GTX 690 is a whopping 75% faster than the single-GPU GTX 680 (though their results are somewhat skewed by the inclusion of the insane StarCraft 2 benchmark) and that it'll deliver roughly the same performance you'd get from running two 680s in SLI, but with a lower power requirement and $200 cheaper.
I think it's safe to say that this is mostly a "bragging-rights" card, meant more to keep AMD from claiming it has the fastest single-card GPUs than to actually sell when it's released on May 3rd. But again, monsters like this blaze a trail toward ever-increasing PC gaming performance that others will follow in the future, and give us something to lust after in the meantime. What's the most you've ever spent on a graphics card?
