NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Review: The New High End
by Ryan Smith on May 23, 2013 9:00 AM ESTFar Cry 3
The next game in our benchmark suite is Far Cry 3, Ubisoft’s island-jungle action game. A lot like our other jungle game Crysis, Far Cry 3 can be quite tough on GPUs, especially with MSAA and improved alpha-to-coverage checking thrown into the mix. On the other hand it’s still a bit of a pig on the CPU side, and seemingly inexplicably we’ve found that it doesn’t play well with HyperThreading on our testbed, making this the only game we’ve ever had to disable HT for to maximize our framerates.
Moving on to the back-half of our games, we’re starting to hit the games that traditionally favor NVIDIA’s architectures over AMD’s. Case in point, the GTX 780 has a very solid 23% lead over the 7970GE. Meanwhile the Titan gap is once more around 10%, and this is another Title where the GTX 780 does particularly well relative to the GTX 580, clearing the last generation frontrunner by 77%. Far Cry 3 ends up being an excellent example of where the GTX 780 becomes a filler card; it cleanly fills the gap between the GTX 680 and GTX Titan.
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just4U - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I love the fact that their using the cooler they used for the Titan. While I plan to wait (no need to upgrade right now) I'd like to see more of that.. It's a feature I'd pay for from both Nvidia and Amd.HalloweenJack - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
no compute with the GTX 780 - the DP is similar to a GTX 480 and way way down on a 7970. no folding on these thenBiffaZ - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Folding doesn't use DP currently, its SP, same for most @home type compute apps, the main exclusion being Milkyway@Home which needs DP alot.boe - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Bring on the DirectCU version and I'll order 2 today!slickr - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
At $650 its way too expensive. Two years ago this card would have been $500 at launch and within 4-5 months it would have been $400 with the slower cut down version at $300 and mid range cards $200.I hope people aren't stupid to buy this overpriced card that only brings about 5fps more than AMD top end single card.
chizow - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I think if it launched last year, it's price would have been more justified, but Nvidia sat on it for a year while they propped up mid-range GK104 as flagship. Very disappointing.Measured on it's own merits, GTX 780 is very impressive and probably worth the increase over previous flagship price points. For example, it's generally 80% faster than GTX 580, almost 100% faster than GTX 480, it's predecessors. In the past the increase might only be ~60-75% and improve some with driver gains. It also adds some bling and improvements with the cooler.
It's just too late imo for Nvidia to ask those kinds of prices, especially after lying to their fanbase about GK104 always slotted as Kepler flagship.
JPForums - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I love what you are doing with frame time deltas. Some sites don't quite seem to understand that you can maintain low maximum frame times while still introducing stutter (especially in the simulation time counter) by having large deltas between frames. In the worst case, your simulation time can slow down (or speed up) while your frame time moves back in the opposite direction exaggerating the result.Admittedly I may be misunderstanding your method as I'm much more accustomed to seeing algebraic equations describing the method, but assuming I get it, I'd like to suggest further modification to you method to deal with performance swings that occur expectedly (transition to/from cut-scenes, arrival/departure of graphically intense elements, etc.). Rather than compare the average of the delta between frames against an average frame time across the entire run, you could compare instantaneous frame time against a sliding window average. The window could be large for games with consistent performance and smaller for games with mood swings. Using percentages when comparing against the average frame times for the entire run can result in situations where two graphics solutions with the exact same deltas would show the one with better performance having worse deltas. As an example, take any video cards frame time graph and subtract 5ms from each frame time and compare the two resulting delta percentages. A sliding window accounts for natural performance deviations while still giving a baseline to compare frame times swings from. If you are dead set on percentages, you can take them from there as the delta percentages from local frame time averages are more relevant than the delta percentage from the runs overall average. Given my love of number manipulation, though, I'd still prefer to see the absolute frame time difference from the sliding window average. It would make it much easier for me to see whether the difference to the windowed average is large (lets say >15ms) or small (say <4ms). Of course, while I'm being demanding, it would be nice to get an xls, csv, or some other format of file with the absolute frame times so I can run whatever graph I want to see myself. I won't hold my breath. Take some of my suggestions, all of them, or none of them. I'm just happy to see where things are going.
Arnulf - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
The correct metric for this comparison would be die size (area) and complexity of manufacturing rather than the number of transistors.RAM modules contain far more transistors (at least a couple of transistors per bit, with common 4 GB = 32 Gb = 64+ billion transistors per stick modules selling for less than $30 on Newegg), yet cost peanuts compared to this overpriced abomination that is 780.
marc1000 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
and GTX 760 ??? what will it be? will it be $200??or maybe the 660 will be rebranded as 750 and go to $150??
kilkennycat - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Fyi: eVGA offers "Superclocked" versions of the GTX780 with either a eVGA-designed "ACX" dual-open-fan cooler, or the nVidia-designed "titan"blower. Both at $659 are ~ $10 more than the default-speed version. The overclocks are quite substantial, 941MHz base, 993MHz boost (vs default 863/902) for the "titan" blower version, 967/1020 for the ACX-cooler version. The ACX cooler is likely to be more noisy than the "titan", plus it will dump some exhaust heat back into the computer case. Both of these eVGa Superclocked types were available for a short time on Newegg this morning, now "Auto Notify" :-( :-(