Upping the ante in PC gaming graphics once again, NVIDIA have launched their latest contender, giving retail branding to the tech formerly codenamed Kepler as the GeForce GTX 680. Early reports have the card selling out across most online US outlets (thanks DM), so it's probably going to be a while before these bad boys hit local Australian shelves, but in the mean time, you can read all about what makes them so appealing over on geforce.com.

In what looks to be one of the most significant steps forward in PC graphics hardware in a few years, the GTX 680 obviously doesn't just offer more grunt on a single card than its predecessors, there's a few cool new bits of tech to go with it. Chief among these is the card's improved power efficiency, meaning it can net you more frames on less juice. This is further leveraged with a new efficiency technique NVIDIA are called GPU boost, so when a game isn't using as much power as your card can draw, the system ramps up the cards clock speed to pump out more FPS.

There's also a few other tasty additions, so grab a bucket for your drool and hit the video below (or here for the HD video page) for a demonstration of some of the goodness.

Additionally, according to Shacknews, the GTX 680 is actually the card that Epic Games have been using to demo their incredibly impressive Samaritan demo, which reportedly runs in real time, only drawing 195 Watts, whereas it previously required three GTX 580s and an insane 732 Watts to run.