NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Review: The New High End
by Ryan Smith on May 23, 2013 9:00 AM ESTTotal War: Shogun 2
Our next benchmark is Shogun 2, which is a continuing favorite to our benchmark suite. Total War: Shogun 2 is the latest installment of the long-running Total War series of turn based strategy games, and alongside Civilization V is notable for just how many units it can put on a screen at once. Even 2 years after its release it’s still a very punishing game at its highest settings due to the amount of shading and memory those units require.
Compared to DiRT, Shogun 2 immediately presents us with a scenario that sees GTX 680 doing very well. At 51.6fps at 2560, the GTX 780 is some 34% ahead of the GTX 680, 39% ahead of the 7970GE, and only 11% behind Titan. Compared to the GTX 680 tier cards this is actually better than the GTX 780 will get on average, and like Titan before it the lead will depend on just what aspect of the GPU any given game is pushing the most. At the same time 11% is fairly consistent for how far behind Titan GTX 780 will trail, reinforcing its position as a budget Titan card.
As an aside, this is by far the best game for the GTX 780 versus the old Fermi based GTX 580. Here we see the GTX 780 flat-out double the performance of the GTX 580. NVIDIA may have a tough time selling the GTX 780 on its price tag, but in cases like this the performance gains over last generation hardware are very remarkable.
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aidivn - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
so, how many Double Precision units are there in each SMX unit of gtx780? titan had 64 dp units in each of their SMX units which totaled to 896 dp unitsAnd can u turn them on or off from the forcewre driver menu like “CUDA – Double Precision” for gtx780?
Ryan Smith - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Hardware wise this is GK110, so the 64 DP units are there. But most of them would be disabled to get the 1/24 FP64 rate.aidivn - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
so how many are disabled and how many are enabled (numbers please)?Ryan Smith - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
You would have only 1/8th enabled. So 8 per SMX are enabled, while the other 56 are disabled.aidivn - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
so, the GTX780 only has 96 DP units enabled while the GTX TITAN has 896 DP units enabled...thats a huge cut on double precisionDanNeely - Sunday, May 26, 2013 - link
That surprised me too. Previously the cards based on the G*100/110 cards were 1/8; this is a major hit vs the 580/480/280 series cards.Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
"GTX 780 on the other hand is a pure gaming/consumer part like the rest of the GeForce lineup, meaning NVIDIA has stripped it of Titan’s marquee compute feature: uncapped double precision (FP64) performance. As a result GTX 780 can offer 90% of GTX Titan’s gaming performance, but it can only offer a fraction of GTX Titan’s FP64 compute performance, topping out at 1/24th FP32 performance rather than 1/3rd like Titan."Seriously, this is just...it's asinine. Utterly asinine.
tipoo - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Market segmentation is nothing new. The Titan really is a steal if you need DP, the next card up is 2400 dollars.Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I'm well aware of the existence of market segmentation, but this is just ridiculous. Putting ECC RAM on professional cards is segmentation. Disabling otherwise functional features of hardware, most likely in the software drivers...that's just...ugh.SymphonyX7 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I just noticed that the Radeon HD 7970 Ghz Edition has been trouncing the GTX 680 in most of the benchmarks and trailing the GTX 680 in those benchmarks that traditionally favored Kepler. What the heck just happened? Didn't the review of the Radeon HD 7970 Ghz Edition say that it was basically tied with the GTX 680?