NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 Review: The $400 Fight
by Ryan Smith on May 30, 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.
Despite the fact that it’s a $400 card, GTX 770 straddles the line between being a card best suited for 2560x1440, and a card best suited for 1920x1080. With GTX 780 and above we could get away with 2560 on the highest settings in most games, but with GTX 770 there will at times be compromises, either in quality/resolution, or dropping below 60fps.
In any case, DiRT: Showdown remains a troublesome title for NVIDIA. With its advanced lighting system on, GTX 770 trails the 7970 – let alone the 7970GE – at every resolution. For GTX 780 this wasn’t a problem, but for GTX 770 this means dropping below 60fps at 2560.
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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.