NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Review: The New High End
by Ryan Smith on May 23, 2013 9:00 AM ESTFar Cry 3
The next game in our benchmark suite is Far Cry 3, Ubisoft’s island-jungle action game. A lot like our other jungle game Crysis, Far Cry 3 can be quite tough on GPUs, especially with MSAA and improved alpha-to-coverage checking thrown into the mix. On the other hand it’s still a bit of a pig on the CPU side, and seemingly inexplicably we’ve found that it doesn’t play well with HyperThreading on our testbed, making this the only game we’ve ever had to disable HT for to maximize our framerates.
Moving on to the back-half of our games, we’re starting to hit the games that traditionally favor NVIDIA’s architectures over AMD’s. Case in point, the GTX 780 has a very solid 23% lead over the 7970GE. Meanwhile the Titan gap is once more around 10%, and this is another Title where the GTX 780 does particularly well relative to the GTX 580, clearing the last generation frontrunner by 77%. Far Cry 3 ends up being an excellent example of where the GTX 780 becomes a filler card; it cleanly fills the gap between the GTX 680 and GTX Titan.
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lukarak - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
1/3rd FP32 and 1/24th FP32 is nowhere near 10-15% apart. Gaming is not everything.chizow - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Yes fine cut gaming performance on 780 and Titan down to 1/24th and see how many of these you sell at $650 and $1000.Hrel - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
THANK YOU!!!! WHY this kind of thing isn't IN the review is beyond me. As much good work as Nvidia is doing they're pricing schemes, naming schemes and general abuse of customers has turned me off of them forever. Which convenient because AMD is really getting their shit together quickly.chizow - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Ryan has danced around this topic in the past, he's a pretty straight shooter overall but it goes without saying why he isn't harping on this in his review. He has to protect his (and AT's) relationship with Nvidia to keep the gravy train flowing. They have gotten in trouble with Nvidia in the past (sometime around the "not covering PhysX enough" fiasco, along with HardOCP) and as a result, their review allocation suffered.In the end, while it may be the truth, no one with a vested interest in these products and their future success contributing to their livelihoods wants to hear about it, I guess. It's just us, the consumers that suffer for it, so I do feel it's important to voice my opinion on the matter.
Ryan Smith - Sunday, May 26, 2013 - link
While you are welcome to your opinion and I doubt I'll be able to change it, I would note that I take a dim view towards such unfounded nonsense.We have a very clear stance with NVIDIA: we write what we believe. If we like a product we praise it, if we don't like a product we'll say so, and if we see an issue we'll bring it up. We are the press and our role is clear; we are not any company's friend or foe, but a 3rd party who stakes our name and reputation (and livelihood!) on providing unbiased and fair analysis of technologies and products. NVIDIA certainly doesn't get a say in any of this, and the only thing our relationship is built upon is their trusting our methods and conclusions. We certainly don't require NVIDIA's blessing to do what we do, and publishing the truth has and always will come first, vendor relationships be damned. So if I do or do not mention something in an article, it's not about "protecting the gravy train", but about what I, the reviewer, find important and worth mentioning.
On a side note, I would note that in the 4 years I have had this post, we have never had an issue with review allocation (and I've said some pretty harsh things about NVIDIA products at times). So I'm not sure where you're hearing otherwise.
chizow - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
Hi Ryan I respect your take on it and as I've said already, you generally comment on and understand more about the impact of pricing and economy more than most other reviews, which is a big part of the reason I appreciate AT reviews over others.That being said, much of this type of commentary about pricing/economics can be viewed as editorializing, so while I'm not in any way saying companies influence your actual review results and conclusions, the choice NOT to speak about topics that may be considered out of bounds for a review does not fall under the scope of your reputation or independence as a reviewer.
If we're being honest here, we're all human and business is conducted between humans with varying degrees of interpersonal relationships. While you may consider yourself truthful and forthcoming always, the tendency to bite your tongue when friendships are at stake is only natural and human. Certainly, a "How's your family?" greeting is much warmer than a "Hey what's with all that crap you wrote about our GTX Titan pricing?" when you meet up at the latest trade show or press event. Similarly, it should be no surprise when Anand refers to various moves/hires at these companies as good/close friends, that he is going to protect those friendships where and when he can.
In any case, the bit I wrote about allocation was about the same time ExtremeTech got in trouble with Nvidia and felt they were blacklisted for not writing enough about PhysX. HardOCP got in similar trouble for blowing off entire portions of Nvidia's press stack and you similarly glossed over a bunch of the stuff Nvidia wanted you to cover. Subsequently, I do recall you did not have product on launch day and maybe later it was clarified there was some shipping mistake. Was a minor release, maybe one of the later Fermi parts. I may be mistaken, but pretty sure that was the case.
Razorbak86 - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
Sounds like you've got an axe to grind, and a tin-foil hat for armor. ;)ambientblue - Thursday, August 8, 2013 - link
Well, you failed to note how the GTX 780 is essentially kepler's version of a GTX 570. It's priced twice as high though. The Titan should have been a GTX 680 last year... its only a prosumer card because of the price LOL. that's like saying the GTX 480 is a prosumer card!!!cityuser - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
whatever Nvidia do, it never improve their 2D quality, I mean , look at what nVidia will give you at BluRay playing, the color still dead , dull, not really enjoyable.It's terrible to use nVidia to HD home cinema, whatever setting you try.
Why nVidia can ignore this? because it's spoiled.
Dribble - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
What are you going on about?Bluray is digital, hdmi is digital - that means the signal is decoded and basically sent straight to the TV - there is no fiddling with colours, or sharpening or anything else required.