NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Review: The New High End
by Ryan Smith on May 23, 2013 9:00 AM ESTSleeping Dogs
Another Square Enix game, Sleeping Dogs is one of the few open world games to be released with any kind of benchmark, giving us a unique opportunity to benchmark an open world game. Like most console ports, Sleeping Dogs’ base assets are not extremely demanding, but it makes up for it with its interesting anti-aliasing implementation, a mix of FXAA and SSAA that at its highest settings does an impeccable job of removing jaggies. However by effectively rendering the game world multiple times over, it can also require a very powerful video card to drive these high AA modes.
Sleeping Dogs is another game where the 780 fills out a gap, but falls closer to the 7970GE than NVIDIA would like to see. At 64.4fps it’s fast enough to crash past 60fps at 2560 with high AA, but this means it’s narrower win for the GTX 780, beating the GTX 680 by 23% but the 7970GE by just 7%. Meanwhile the GTX 780 trails the GTX Titan by 12%.
The minimum framerates, though not bad on their own, do not do the GTX 780 any favors here, and we see the GTX 780 fall behind the 7970GE here by over 10%. Interestingly this is just about an all-around worst case scenario for the GTX 780, which has the GTX 780 trailing the GTX Titan by almost the full 15% theoretical shader/texture performance gap, and the lead over the GTX 680 is only 10%. Sleeping Dogs use of SSAA in higher anti-aliasing modes is very hard on the shaders, and this is a prime example of what GTX 780’s weak spot is going to be relative to GTX Titan.
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SymphonyX7 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
*mildly/narrowly trailing the GTX 680chizow - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
AMD released some significant driver updates in ~Oct 2012, branded "Never Settle" drivers that did boost GCN performance significantly, ~10-20% in some cases where they were clearly deficient relative to Nvidia parts. It was enough to make up the difference in a lot of cases or extend the lead to where the GE is generally faster than the 680.On the flipside, some of AMD's performance claims, particularly with CF have come under fire due to concerns about microstutter and frame latency, ie. the ongoing runtframe saga.
Vayra - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Drivers possibly?kallogan - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
High end overpriced gpu again ! Next !wumpus - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Except that the 780 is nothing more than a Titan with even more cuda performance disabled. Presumably, they are expecting to get Titan sales to people interested in GPU computing, if only for geeklust/boasting.wumpus - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
My above comment was supposed to be a reply. Ignore/delete if possible.ifrit39 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Shadow Play is the most interesting news here. It costs a not-insignificant amount of money to buy a decent capture card that will record HD video. This is a great alternative as it requires no extra hardware and has little CPU/GPU overhead. Anything that ends up on the net will be compressed by youtube or other service anyway. I can't wait to remove fraps and install shadow play.ahamling27 - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Fraps isn't the best, but they somehow have the market cornered. Look up Bandicam, I use it exclusively and I get great captures at a fraction the size. Plus they aren't cut up into 4 gig files. It has at least 15x more customization like putting watermarks in your capture or if you do like to segment your files you can have it do that at any size or time length you want. Plus you can record two sound sources at once, like your game and mic, or your game and whatever voice chat software you use.Anyway, I probably sound like I work for them now, but I can assure you I don't. This Shadow Play feature is definitely piquing my interest. If it's implemented wisely, it might just shut all the other software solutions down.
garadante - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
There were two things that instantly made me dislike this card, much as I've liked Nvidia in the past: completely disabling the compute performance down to 600 series levels which was the reason I was more forgiving towards AMD in the 600/7000 series generation, and that they've priced this card at $650. If I remember correctly, the 680 was priced at $500-550 at launch, and that itself was hard to stomach as it was and still is widely believed GK104 was meant to be their mid-range chip. This 780 is more like what I imagined the 680 having been and if it launched at that price point, I'd be more forgiving.As it is... I'm very much rooting for AMD. I hope with these new hires, of which Anandtech even has an article of their new dream team or some such, that AMD can become competitive. Hopefully the experience developers get with their kind-of-funky architecture with the new consoles, however underwhelming they are, brings software on the PC both better multithreaded programming and performance, and better programming and performance to take advantage of AMD's module scheme. Intel and Nvidia both need some competition so we can get this computer hardware industry a bit less stagnated and better for the consumer.
EJS1980 - Tuesday, May 28, 2013 - link
The 680 was $500 at launch, and was the main reason why AMD received so much flak for their 7970 pricing. At the time it launched, the 680 blew the 7970 away in terms of gaming performance, which was thee reason AMD had to respond with across the board price drops on the 7950/70, even though it took them a few months.