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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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!