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 ESTMetro: Last Light
As always, kicking off our look at performance is 4A Games’ latest entry in their Metro series of subterranean shooters, Metro: Last Light. The original Metro: 2033 was a graphically punishing game for its time and Metro: Last Light is in its own right too. On the other hand it scales well with resolution and quality settings, so it’s still playable on lower end hardware.
Diving into our performance analysis, we’ll be looking at a few different factors. On a competitive basis, the GTX 660 and the R7 265 are the GTX 750 Ti’s closest competitors. Though we’ll also want to compare it to GTX 650, so see what a GK107 versus GM107 matchup looks like. Meanwhile the GTX 750’s closest competitors will be the R7 260X, and to a lesser degree the GTX 650 Ti.
Being one of our more difficult games, Metro shows right off the bat that these mainstream video cards, no matter how fast they are, will face a difficult time. The GTX 750 Ti can stay comfortably above the 30fps at high quality, but the GTX 750 not so much.
What’s clear right off the bat two is two things. The first is that GTX 750 Ti, the GM107 flagship, is significantly faster than GTX 650, the GK107 flagship. GTX 750 Ti is just short of doubling GTX 650’s performance in this benchmark.
The second point is that neither GTX 750 series card is going to fare well against its AMD counterpart. Both the R7 265 and R7 260 are faster than the GeForce cards, and by over 10% at times.
Finally, GTX 750 Ti won’t be touching GTX 660 here. It’s close, but especially at higher quality settings the GTX 660 is pulling away. GTX 750 Ti can’t completely make up for the lack of memory bandwidth and ROP throughput.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
177 Comments
View All Comments
EdgeOfDetroit - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
This card (Evga 750 Ti OC) is replacing a 560Ti for me. Its slower but its not my primary game machine anymore anyways. I'll admit I was kinda bummed when the 700 series stopped at the 760, and now that the 750 is here, its like they skipped the true successor to the 560 and 660. I can probably still get something for my 560Ti, at least.rhx123 - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
I wonder if we'll get the 750Ti or even the 750 in a half height config.It would be nice for HTPCs given the power draw, but I'm not optimistic.
There's still nothing really decent in the half height Nvidia camp.
Frenetic Pony - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
"it is unfortunate, as NVIDIA carries enough market share that their support (or lack thereof) for a feature is often the deciding factor whether it’s used"No this time. Both the Xbone and PS4 are fully feature compliant, as is GCN 1.1 cards, heck even GCN 1.0 has a lot of the features required. With the new consoles, especially the PS4, selling incredibly well these are going to be the baseline, and if you buy a NVIDIA card without it, you be SOL for the highest end stuff.
Just another disappointment with Maxwell, when AMD is already beating Nvidia price for performance wise very solidly. Which is a shame, I love their steady and predictable driver support and well designed cooling set ups. But if they're not going to compete, especially with the rumors of how much Broadwell supposedly massively improves on Intel's mobile stuff, well then I just don't know what to say.
Rebel1080 - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
Can we all come to a consensus by declaring the 8th console generation an a epic bust!!! When the Seventh console generation consoles (PS3/XB360) made their debut it took Nvidia and AMD 12-18 months to ship a mainstream GPU that could match or exceed thier performance. This generation it only took 3 months at 2/3rds the price those cards sold at (3870/8800GT).It's pretty condemning that both Sony and MSFT's toy boxes are getting spanked by $119-149 cards. Worst of all the cards are now coming from both gpu companies for which I'm sure gives Nvidia all smiles.
FearfulSPARTAN - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
Really an epic bust.... Come on now we all knew from the start they were not going to be bleeding edge based on the specs. They were not going for strong single threaded performance they were aiming for well threaded good enough cpu performance and the gpus they had were average at their current time. However considering the ps4 and x1 are selling very well calling the entire gen a bust already is just stupid. You dont need high performance for consoles when you have developers coding to scrape every bit of performance they can out of your hardware, thats something we dont have in the pc space and why most gamers are not using those cards that just met last gen console performance seven years ago.Rebel1080 - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
They're selling well for the same reasons iTards keep purchasing Apple products even though they only offer incremental updates on both hardware and less on software. It's something I like to call "The Lemming Effect".Developers code to the metal but that only does so much and then you end up having to compromise the final product via lower res, lower fps, lower texture detail. Ironcially I was watching several YouTube videos of current gen games (BF3&4, Crysis 3, Grid 2, AC4) running at playable fps between 720p & 900P on a Radeon 3870.
oleguy682 - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
Except that unlike Apple, Sony and Microsoft are selling each unit at a loss once the BOM, assembly, shipping, and R&D are taken into consideration. The PS3 was a $3 billion loss in the first two years it was available. The hope is that licensing fees, add-ons, content delivery, etc. will result in enough revenue to offset the investment, subsidize further R&D, and leave a bit left over for profit. Apple, on the other hand, is making money on both the hardware and the services.And believe it or not, there are a lot more console gamers than PC gamers. Gartner estimates that in 2012, PC gaming made up only $14 billion of the $79 billion gaming market. This does include hardware, in which the consoles and handheld devices (likely) get an advantage, but 2012 was before the PS4 and Xbone were released.
So while it might be off-the-shelf for this generation, it was never advertised as anything more than a substantial upgrade over the previous consoles, both of which were developed in the early 2000s. In fact, they were designed for 1080p gaming, and that's what they can accomplish (well, maybe not the Xbone if recent reports are correct). Given that 2160p TVs (because calling it 4K is dumb and misleading) are but a pipe dream for all but the most well-heeled of the world and that PCs can't even come close to the performance needed to drive such dense displays (short of spending $1,000+ on GPUs alone), there is no need to over-engineer the consoles to do something that won't be asked of them until they are near EOL.
Rebel1080 - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
PC Gaming is growing faster globally than the console market because purchasing consoles in many nations is extremely cost prohibitive due to crushing tariffs. Figure that in 3yrs time both Intel and AMD will have IGPs that will trounce the PS4 and will probably sell for under $99 USD. PC hardware is generally much more accessible to people living in places like Brazil, China and India compared to consoles. It would actually cost less to build a gaming PC if you live there.The console market is the USA, Japan and Western Europe, as the economies of these nations continue to decline (all 3 are still in recession) people who want to game without spending a ton will seek lower cost alternatives. With low wattage cards like the 750Ti suddenly every Joe with a 5yr old Dell/HP desktop can now have console level gaming for a fraction of the cost without touching any of his other hardware.
Rebel1080 - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/sony-says-brazil-...oleguy682 - Wednesday, February 19, 2014 - link
Brazil is only Brazil. It does not have any bearing on China or India or any other developing nation as they all choose their own path on how they tax and tariff imports. Second, throwing a 750Ti into a commodity desktop (the $800-1,200 variety) from 3 years ago, let alone 5, is unlikely to result in performance gains that would turn it into a full-bore 1080p machine that can run with the same level of eye-candy as a PS4 or XBone. The CPU and memory systems are going to be huge limiting factors.As far as the PC being a faster growing segment, the Gartner report from this fall thinks that PC gaming hardware and software will rise from the 2012 baseline of 18.3% of spending to 19.4% of spending in 2015. So yes, it will grow, but it's such a small share already that it barely does anything to move the needle in terms of where gaming goes. In contrast, consoles are expected to grow from 47.4% to 49.6% of spending. The losing sectors are going to be handheld gaming, eaten mostly by tablets and smartphones. PCs aren't dying, but they aren't thriving, regardless of what Brazil does with PS4 imports in 2014.