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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Stuka87 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Not for the 780 they don't. There are some cards that have Duke Nukem Forever (lol) and some that have Metro: Last Light. But nothing like what AMD offers.chizow - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Metro was not listed when I checked today, EVGA in the past has done their customers right by sending them codes, but not always, depends how tightly Nvidia controls the promotion.jonjonjonj - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
i want free games. wah wah wah. screw free games. i would rather a cheaper more competitively price card then get some game i don't even want.Homeles - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I really like the "Delta Performances" method of comparing the smoothness between each card.hero1 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
This is one awesome card. I really don't think that AMD can compete with Nvidia atm but I would like to see what they have to offer. I want this card but I will be buying the custom cooled ones due to better cooling. Thanks for an awesome review, I have been waiting patiently, not!formulav8 - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
I haven't seen anything even close to dire for AMD that they should all that worried about. Unless I missed something?mayankleoboy1 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
$649 ?Move along, nothing to do here.
EzioAs - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
That was my original plan, but I ended up reading the article. Ahh, curiosity...Spoelie - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
The paragraph on SMXs and GPCs is confusing without the information available from the original Titan piece. One has to remember or infer that Titan already had an SMX disabled, and that in fact GK110 has 15 SMXs built in. This conclusion is also non-obvious because the text before discussed there were no disabled functional units in *most* product tiers.Otherwise the reduction from 14 SMXs to 12 SMXs would imply 2 disabled clusters, not 3.
chaosbloodterfly - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Waiting to see what AMD has for the 8970. Hopefully they don't do what nVidia did for the 680 and release something with barely better performance with almost zero pricing pressure 6 months later.I want something worth liquid cooling damn it!