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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Akrovah - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Oh yeah, forgot audio data, all of which gets stored in main RAM. And THAT will take up a pretty nice chunk of space righ there.Sivar - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
You realize, of course, that the 8GB RAM in consoles is 8GB *TOTAL* RAM, whose capacity and bandwidth must be shared for video tasks, the OS, and shuffling the game's data files.A PC with a 3GB video card can use that 3GB exclusively for textures and other video card stuff.
B3an - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
See my comment above.DanNeely - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Right now all we've got is the reference card being rebadged by a half dozenish companies. Give it a few weeks or a month and I'm certain someone will start selling a 6GB model. People gaming at 2560 or on 3 monitor setups might benefit from the wait; people who just want to crank AA at 1080p or even just be able to always play at max instead of fiddling with settings (and there're a lot more of them than there are of us) have no real reason to wait. Also, in 12 months Maxwell will be out and with the power of a die shrink behind it the 860 will probably be able to match what the 780 does anyway.DanNeely - Tuesday, May 28, 2013 - link
On HardOCP's forum I've read that nVidia's told it's partners they shouldn't make a 6GB variant of the 780 (presumably to protect Titan sales). While it's possible one of them might do so anyway; getting nVidia mad at them isn't a good business strategy so it's doubtful any will.tipoo - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
If a slightly cut down Titan is their solution for the higher end 700 series card, I wonder what else the series will be like? Will everything just plop down a price category, the 680 in the 670s price point, etc? That would be uninteresting, but reasonable I guess, given how much power Kepler has on tap. And it wouldn't do much for mobile.DigitalFreak - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
The 770 will be identical to the 680, but with a slightly faster clock speed. I believe the same will be true with the 760 / 670. Those cards are probably still under NDA, which is why they weren't mentioned.chizow - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Yep 770 at least is supposed to launch a week from today, 5/30. Satisfy demand from the top-down and grab a few impulse buyers who can't wait along the way.yannigr - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
No free games. With an AMD card you also get many AAA games. So Nvidia is a little more expensive than just +$200 compared with 7970GE.I am expecting reviewers someday to stop ignoring game bundles because they come from AMD. We are not talking for one or two games here, for old games, or demos. We are talking about MONEY. 6-7-8-9-10 free AAA titles are MONEY.
Tuvok86 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I believe nVidia has bundles as well