NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Review: The New High End
by Ryan Smith on May 23, 2013 9:00 AM ESTCivilization V
Our other strategy game, Civilization V, gives us an interesting look at things that other RTSes cannot match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry, driver command lists for reducing CPU overhead, and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
Civilization V is another game that not only tends to favor NVIDIA video cards, but strongly favors GK110 cards in particular. As a result the lead over the 7970GE is an incredible 47%, and the lead over the GTX 680 is right next to it at 46%. Though admittedly we’ve reached a point where the difference is almost academic, since even a GTX 680 can hit 60fps at 2560.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
155 Comments
View All Comments
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?