NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 Review: The $400 Fight
by Ryan Smith on May 30, 2013 9:00 AM ESTSynthetics
As always we’ll also take a quick look at synthetic performance, though as GTX 780 is just another GK110 card, there shouldn't be any surprises here. These tests are mostly for comparing cards from within a manufacturer, as opposed to directly comparing AMD and NVIDIA cards. We’ll start with 3DMark Vantage’s Pixel Fill test.
Thanks to the combination of core clock and memory clock increases, GTX 770 doesn’t just pass GTX 680, but even GTX 780. This is a bit paradoxical at first, but it’s worth keeping in mind that this is a pixel throughput test, and GTX 770’s ROPs are clocked a good 200MHz+ higher than GTX 780’s. In real games GTX 780 is still going to have the edge, but in edge cases having such a clockspeed gap can lead to some unusual outcomes.
Moving on, we have our 3DMark Vantage texture fillrate test, which does for texels and texture mapping units what the previous test does for ROPs.
Texel throughput on the other hand is all about the core clocks; the improvement over the GTX 680 is barely at 3%, and GTX 770 is well behind GTX 780.
Finally we’ll take a quick look at tessellation performance with TessMark.
GTX 770 pulls ahead in TessMark by more than we would expect given the fact that this test should be largely GPU limited. This may be a case of GTX 770 squeezing out a bit more performance due to GPU Boost 2.0.
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djboxbaba - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
I'd say thats a good choice for the 1440p monitor. As far as the actual card, I agree with you that your decision should be between those 2 cards. Just as performance of the 7970GHz has increased due to driver updates, I think we can expect some performance increase from the 770 over time as well. Not sure why that was not mentioned at all in the article. If i were in your situation it would probably come down to the bundled games that come with the AMD card, do you want those games?yasamoka - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
No, we cannot expect performance increases from the 770 over time due to driver updates. The 770 is GK104, same architecture as the GTX680. It's just a higher-clocked 680. 680 drivers have been rolling since its release in March, it's been 14 months.The regular game-specific performance improvements will be there for both cards, for games that are coming, but we can't expect the 770 to improve in performance due to drivers as it is already a 14-month mature product (refresh), driver-wise.
EJS1980 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
That makes no sense. If the 7970 has been benefiting greatly from each driver update, and its almost 6 months older than GK104, why can the 7970 improve but the 770 can't?Galidou - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
Wow that's a real lack of information to come up with an answer like this. 7970 was a COMPLETE remake of what had been done before. Totally justifiable that drivers improved performance like the gtx 600 series that was new. The 770 is TOTALLY a 680, physically, it's simply a GK 104 die pushed to the extreme, almost nothing new on the driver side from 680 to 770. Not that they can't improve anything but most of the job is done on the driver side of things.Stuka87 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
Did you mean to say 7970Ghz? The 7950 is already at $300, has been for some time.joel4565 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
Yeah I did mean 7970Ghz. Sorry for confusion.EJS1980 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
I'd say forget the Dell, and go with an Overlord Tempest OC. It's the same price & panel as you'd get from Dell, except it can be overclocked to 120hz. They're a California based company, and their sales/IT departments are awesome. If you're not interested in overclocking, they sell a 60hz model for about $400. You should seriously check them out.cbrownx88 - Friday, May 31, 2013 - link
I went to their page and everything is sold out... :(Hrel - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
Pretty happy to see Nvidia FINALLY realize the potential of this architexture. Gives me hope for the next generation; combined with a process node drop we should see pretty impressive performance. This refresh will keep the market feeling fresh until then. I just hope they're a lot more aggressive with pricing. I know you say in the article that you were surprised by this price; but really it's still too high. It's not absurd or anything, and assuming the price drops 50+ bucks by fall it's in line with GPU market trends. But I'd like to see some price pressure FROM Nvidia, instead of AMD always being the one to kick off a price war.trajan2448 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
Most of the reviews I've seen have had the 770 beating the 7970gE pretty well. It seems this site really bends over to make AMD look as good as possible, even though the 7970 uses more power and is generally slower and more expensive.