NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Review: The New High End
by Ryan Smith on May 23, 2013 9:00 AM ESTDiRT: Showdown
As always, starting off our benchmark collection is our racing benchmark, DiRT: Showdown. DiRT: Showdown is based on the latest iteration of Codemasters’ EGO engine, which has continually evolved over the years to add more advanced rendering features. It was one of the first games to implement tessellation, and also one of the first games to implement a DirectCompute based forward-rendering compatible lighting system. At the same time as Codemasters is by far the most prevalent PC racing developers, it’s also a good proxy for some of the other racing games on the market like F1 and GRID.
DiRT: Showdown’s lighting system continues to befuddle us at times. Though GK10x Kepler parts generally have mediocre compute performance in pure compute tasks, NVIDIA’s DirectCompute performance has otherwise proven to be appropriately fast, except in the case of DiRT. The fact of the matter is that DiRT is easy enough to run even with its advanced lighting system that there’s no reason not to use it on a card like the GTX 780 at any single-monitor resolution, but doing so does put the GTX 780 in a bad light relative to AMD’s best cards. Nor does this put GK110 in a particularly good light, as its compute enhancements don’t bring it much of an advantage here beyond what the larger number of shaders affords.
Like Titan before it, the GTX 780 falls slightly behind AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, the only such benchmark where this occurs. The end result being that the GTX 780 trails the 7970GE by about 7%, and the GTX Titan by 6%. Otherwise we’ve seen Titan (and will see GTX 780) do much better in virtually every other benchmark.
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Finally - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
The GTX770 is a GTX680 with a different BIOS.Degong330 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Amused to see blind fanboy comments=PaulRod - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Well it is... slightly tweaked core, new bios, slightly improved performance... only worth buying if you're still on a 500/6000 series card or older.YukaKun - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Actually, it is true... At least, for the curent PCB GTX680'sCheers!
Ninjawithagun - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
No, Finally is correct - the GTX 770 really is a GTX680 with a different BIOS! Unfortunately, there is no way to flash an existing GTX680 to a GTX770, in spite of early reports that such a capability existed. It was found out that in fact, the BIOS that was used to flash a GTX680 to a GTX770 was in fact a fake. The BIOS was a modified GTX680 BIOS made to look as if it were a GTX770 BIOS. Confused yet? lol The bottom line is that the only difference between a GTX680 and GTX770 is the clock speeds. The GTX770 comes in at around 11-12% faster clock speeds and as such is about that much faster in frame rate rendering in games. So if you already own one or more GTX680s, it is definitely NOT worth upgrading to a GTX770!An00bis - Friday, May 31, 2013 - link
this reminds me of the 7870, differences of under 10%, about 5% clock to clock compared to a 7850 that can OC the same, and people still buy it even though it's like $50 or more expensive than a 7850, just because it comes with a 1ghz OC, compared to a 7850 that only comes at about 800mhz stock.DanNeely - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
The 770 is using a revised version of the chip. While we're unlikely to see a large improvement it should run slightly faster for the same TDP.Hrel - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
500Machelios - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Better value than Titan, but still very niche...I'd like to see what Nvidia and AMD can bring at $250 in their next gen cards
AssBall - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Agreed. A good video card should cost about as much as a good CPU, or a good MB.