NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 Review: The New Enthusiast Kepler
by Ryan Smith on June 25, 2013 9:00 AM ESTFar Cry 3
The next game in our benchmark suite is Far Cry 3, Ubisoft’s island-jungle action game. A lot like our other jungle game Crysis, Far Cry 3 can be quite tough on GPUs, especially with MSAA and improved alpha-to-coverage checking thrown into the mix. On the other hand it’s still a bit of a pig on the CPU side, and seemingly inexplicably we’ve found that it doesn’t play well with HyperThreading on our testbed, making this the only game we’ve ever had to disable HT for to maximize our framerates.
With Far Cry 3 we’re back to a game where the GTX 760 has a clear lead, surpassing the 7950B by an unexpected 28% at our highest 1080p settings. However 41.5fps is less than idea for an action game like Far Cry 3, so we have to drop the MSAA to take a crack at 60fps. Even then, the GTX 760 leads by 14%.
This also happens to be another great example of the ROP difference between GTX 760 and GTX 660 Ti. With MSAA enabled the GTX 760 takes a clear lead, but without MSAA the two cards are practically tied.
Meanwhile Far Cry 3 is also another strong example of the performance gap between the GTX 760 and cards 2-3 years old. GTX 760 leaves those older cards in the dust by anywhere between 77% for the GTX 560 Ti and 6870, up to 138% for the GTX 460 1GB. CPU performance may have plateaued over the last half-decade, but thanks to the embarrassingly parallel nature of graphics, we continue to see massive gains over a whole generation.
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JlHADJOE - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
The GTX670 still looks like a better configuration. Having two disabled SMs and trying to make up the performance difference with clock speed means the 760 is slightly slower than the 670, all the while using more power. There's likely less performance to be gained from overclocking too.I can only guess that they are heavily binning GK104s and every good chip is going into the 770, and with the product line being cut down the 760 has to accept all the rejects so its spec calls for up to two non-functional SMs.
intercede007 - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
EVGA lists a 4GB part (04G-P4-2766-KR) and an overclocked 4GB part (04G-P4-2768-KR ). The review only covers the reference 2GB design.Is there any reason to think the additional 2GB of memory at the same clock rate as a 2GB part will be worth the additional cost? The price difference appears to be $40.
monkeydude66 - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
Thank you so much for including GTX 460, 560 Ti in the review! Anandtech delivers once again. I find it absolutely ridiculous when major GPU Review sites only compare new GPUs to the last generation or completely unrelated GPUs unworthy of comparing to to a mainstream card. Good work.mapesdhs - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
I'll probably get a 700 series card next month, in which case I'll start adding data to my
site, which already has a lot of 460 info. Do you have a 460? (or two?) If so, which models?
Ian.
monkeydude66 - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
Yeah, I have the Gigabyte GV-N460OC-1GI with 1GB. Planing to upgrade to GTX760 after seeing the +100% performance change.mapesdhs - Monday, July 1, 2013 - link
So is your 460 the version that has a 715MHz core clock? In that case yes indeed, the 760
should give you a major performance bump. Btw, what CPU/mbd do you have? CPU needs
to be reasonably decent to feed something like a 760.
Ian.
SilverBack - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
Ryan the GTX 760 4 gb is out can we get a comparison?slickr - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
Too expensive for me, $250 is still quite a lot, especially since the GTX 460 1GB was $200, then the GTX 560 was $200.I'm going to wait for competition from AMD and see if they offer better value for money.
rs2 - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
How did the 660Ti score so highly on the Crysis 3 benchmark @ 2560x1440? Seems like an invalid result?Ryan Smith - Thursday, June 27, 2013 - link
Good catch. That was a data entry error; that was supposed to be 34, not 44. It has been corrected. Thanks.