The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti and GTX 750 Review: Maxwell Makes Its Move
by Ryan Smith & Ganesh T S on February 18, 2014 9:00 AM ESTHTPC Aspects : Introduction
Home Theater PC (HTPC) enthusiasts keep close tabs on launch of discrete GPUs which don't need a PCIe power connector. Such cards make it easy to upgrade an old PC with a low-wattage PSU into a multimedia powerhouse. Over the last decade or so, GPUs have implemented HTPC functionalities in response to consumer demand as well as changing / expected market trends. In the beginning, we had hardware acceleration for decode of MPEG-2. This was followed by H.264 / VC-1 acceleration (thanks to the emergence of Blu-rays), HD audio bitstreaming and 3D video support. More recently, we had support for playback and decode of videos in 4K resolution.
4K presents tangible benefits to consumers (unlike 3D), and market adoption is rapidly growing. In many respects, this is similar to how people migrated to 720p and 1080i TV sets when vendors started promoting high definition (HD). We know that these early adopters were stuck with expensive CRT-based TVs when the LCD-based 1080p sets came to the market at very reasonable prices. While there is no 'CRT-to-LCD'-like sea-change in the horizon, the imminent launch of HDMI '2.0' (The HDMI consortium wants to do away with version numbers for reasons known only to them) with 4Kp60 capability and display sinks fully compliant with that standard needs to be kept in mind by end users.
In the near future, it is expected that most of the 4K material reaching consumers will be encoded in H.264. Consumer devices such as the GoPro cameras still record 4K in that codec only. From a HTPC GPU perspective, it is imperative that we have support for 4K H.264 decoding. In fact, most real-time encoding activities would utilize H.264, but, a good HEVC (H.265) encoder would definitely be more efficient in terms of bitrate. The problem is that it is very difficult to make a good HEVC encoder operate in real-time. Archiving content wouldn't be a problem, though. So, it can be expected that content from streaming services / local backup (where the encoding is done offline) will move to HEVC first. A future-proof HTPC GPU would be capable of HEVC decode too.
Where does the Maxwell-based 750Ti stand when the above factors are taken into account? Make no mistake, the NVIDIA GT 640 happens to be our favourite HTPC GPU when 4K-capability is considered an absolute necessity. On paper, the 750Ti appears to be a great candidate to take over the reins from the GT 640. In order to evaluate the HTPC credentials, we put the 750Ti to test against the Zotac GT 640 as well as the Sapphire Radeon HD 7750.
In our HTPC coverage, we first look at GPU support for network streaming services, followed by hardware decoder performance for local file playback. This section also covers madVR. In the third section, we take a look some of the miscellaneous HTPC aspects such as refresh rate accuracy and hardware encoder performance.
The HTPC credentials of the cards were evaluated using the following testbed configuration:
| NVIDIA GT 750Ti HTPC Testbed Setup | |
| Processor / GPU | Intel Core i7-3770K - 3.50 GHz (Turbo to 3.9 GHz) |
| NVIDIA GT 750Ti / Zotac GT 640 / Sapphire Radeon HD 7750 | |
| Motherboard | Asus P8H77-M Pro uATX |
| OS Drive | Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TB |
| Secondary Drive | OCZ Vertex 2 60 GB SSD + Corsair P3 128 GB SSD |
| Memory | G.SKILL ECO Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) F3-10666CL7D-4GBECO CAS 9-9-9-24 |
| Case | Antec VERIS Fusion Remote Max |
| Power Supply | Antec TruePower New TP-550 550W |
| Operating System | Windows 8.1 Pro |
| Display / AVR | |
| Sony KDL46EX720 + Pioneer Elite VSX-32 | |
| Acer H243H | |
| Graphics Drivers | GeForce v334.69 / Catalyst 14.1 Beta |
| Softwares | CyberLink PowerDVD 13 |
| MPC-HC 1.7.3 | |
| madVR 0.87.4 | |
All the three cards were evaluated using the same hardware and software configuration. The Sapphire Radeon HD 7750 has an advantage in the power consumption department thanks to its passive cooling system. Other than that, we are doing apples-to-apples comparison when talking about power consumption numbers for various activities in the next few sections.
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EdgeOfDetroit - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
The EVGAs have Displayport, but they might be the only ones. I ordered the Superclocked 750 Ti with the $5 rebate from Newegg because it had a DisplayPort and the competitors did not.Death666Angel - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
"the 760 has been out for almost a year now and is an older process" -> Still the same 28nm process for the 760 and 750 alike. :)MrPoletski - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
This jump in cache for 128k to 2mb... I wonder what that does for cryptocurrency mining?The Von Matrices - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
Unless the integer shift operation has been improved, not much.g101 - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
Nothing, nividia is fundamentally deficient with integer compute, these are architectural decisions that NVidia made in hopes of squeezing out slightly better FPS. Think: anti-gpgpu, or more of a classic asic.So no, this arc isn't going to change their position with regards to the actual algorithms. Perhaps there will be a moderate increase in sCrypt sha2 performance (due to the memory-hard nature of that implementation), however, nvidia's extreme (and sometimes intentional) incompetence with gpgpu leads me to believe that they still do not understand that GPGPU is the reason AMD's cards are above MSRP. It's not due to one specific hashing function, it's due to their superiority in over 11 specific functions, superior general opencl performance and comparatively greater performance for many SP compute intensive CUDA applications. For instance, cross-comparison between cuda and opencl raycasting yields some very interesting results, with the opencl/AMD solutions outperforming cuda 2:1, often with greater accuracy.
CUDA is easy, NVidia has zero compute advantage beyond 'ease'.
oleguy682 - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
AMD receives nothing for their cards being sold over MSRP. Their channel partners likely have agreements in place for this generation of processors that is locked in at a specific price or price range. Perhaps if they signed new partners, or revised their processors substantially enough to warrant a new agreement, they can take advantage of the higher-than-MSRP situation, but I doubt it. And even the ASUS and Gigabytes of the world are likely unable to capitalize much on the demand. At best, they are able to sell boards to retailers as fast as they come off the line.Only the Neweggs are profiting handsomely off of this.
HighTech4US - Wednesday, February 19, 2014 - link
Von and g101 you are both wrong as Maxwell has now greatly improved integer compute. Check out the following review page from Tom's:http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-75...
Quote: Historically, Nvidia's cards came up short against competing Radeons, which is why you see R9 290X boards selling for $700 and up. But the Maxwell architecture's improvements allow the 60 W GeForce GTX 750 Ti to outperform the 140 W GeForce GTX 660 and approach AMD's 150 W Radeon R7 265, which just launched, still isn't available yet, but is expected to sell for the same $150. On a scale of performance (in kH/s) per watt, that puts Nvidia way out ahead of AMD. Today, four GM107-based cards in a mining rig should be able to outperform a Radeon R9 290X for less money, using less power.
Yojimbo - Wednesday, February 19, 2014 - link
Which is good for NVidia, maybe just lucky. Increasing gamer market share in exchange for some short-term profits is probably a good trade-off for Nvidia. If AMD can't maintain their market share, they'll have less muscle behind their Mantle initiative.hpvd - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
Does this first small Maxwell brings Support for Unified Virtual Memory Management IN HARDWARE? If yes: would be really interesting to see how efficient it could work...details see:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7515/nvidia-announce...
willis936 - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
I would like very much to see a comparison of GM107 in SLI to other $300 graphics card options. Us 560 Ti owners are in a tough position because it's upgradin' time and there's no decent, quiet solution. SLI is still a bit of a hack and from what I can tell can be more of a compatibility headache than a performance gain. These cards may be the exception though.