NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 Review: The New Enthusiast Kepler
by Ryan Smith on June 25, 2013 9:00 AM ESTThe Last of the 700 Series & The Test
In something of an unusual move, along with announcing the GTX 760, NVIDIA also laid out their desktop video card plans for the next several months, leading through the fall. Typically NVIDIA doesn’t announce the non-existence of something, but then again since they apparently have nothing left to hide, there’s little reason not to.
In any case, the GeForce GTX 760 will be the last desktop 700 series card for the next several months. NVIDIA will not be introducing any further desktop cards according to the schedule they’ve provided us, so their lineup will be stable from here on. The 700 series allowed NVIDIA to introduce GK110 based cards and refresh their GK104 based cards, while GK107 and GK106 based products will not be changing. This means that rather than introducing a GTX 750 for example for GK106, NVIDIA will simply keep the top GK106 as the GTX 660.
This move is admittedly a bit weird for how NVIDIA normally does things, as with Fermi they updated their lineups top-to-bottom. Whether this means NVIDIA is planning a late update based on new chips – ala the GeForce GT 200 series, NVIDIA’s 40nm pipe cleaner – or if they simply don’t see a need to roll out new product numbers remains to be seen. But since NVIDIA has added GK106 parts as recently as March, and their top GK106 part doesn’t leave them much room for growth, there’s also a lack of technical opportunity to refresh the rest of their lineup like there was for their GK104 parts. Then again, AMD hasn’t bumped up the series number of their competing retail parts, so there’s little incentive (for once) to play number games in retail.
In any case the current lineup is most likely what we’ll be looking at through the rest of the year, until Maxwell sometime in 2014. This will leave the GTX 760 as NVIDIA’s top 1080p card, while the GK106 based GTX 660 will remain as NVIDIA’s more budget oriented 1080p card.
The Test
The press drivers for the GTX 760 are 320.39, a further bug fix of the existing R319 series drivers that also add support for the GTX 760. On the AMD side we’re using a mix of Catalyst 13.5 (7970) and Catalyst 13.6 (7950, 7870).
For comparison purposes we’ve also dug up a few older cards. Naming aside, NVIDIA’s GTX 560 Ti was their last $250 card and the class of card most 2 year cycle buyers will be coming from. Meanwhile we’re also including AMD’s Radeon HD 6870 and NVIDIA’s GTX 460 1GB. Finally, we’re going to include both the Radeon HD 7950 and 7950 Boost in our charts. The Boost edition has largely supplanted the original in retail, but frustratingly there are still some non-Boost (or otherwise sub-850MHz) cards on the market, so this covers both scenarios.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | EVGA X79 SLI |
| Power Supply: | Antec True Power Quattro 1200 |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung 470 (256GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1867 4 x 4GB (8-10-9-26) |
| Case: | Thermaltake Spedo Advance |
| Monitor: | Samsung 305T |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 7970 AMD Radeon HD 7950 Boost AMD Radeon HD 7950 AMD Radeon HD 7870 AMD Radeon HD 6870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 NVIIDA GeForce GTX 560 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 320.18 NVIDIA ForceWare 320.39 AMD Catalyst 13.5 Beta 2 AMD Catalyst 13.6 Beta 2 |
| OS: | Windows 8 Pro |
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kishorshack - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Looks like the GPU gains over a two year cycle is more than CPU gainsSpending on GPU's is more worth while than Spending on CPU's
Specially if you start from Sandy Bridge in CPU's
DanNeely - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
3D Rendering is a trivially parallelizable workload. As a result it can roughly double in performance with each full node process shrink just by keeping the core design the same but putting twice as many of them on the die. Real world behavior differs mostly in that some of the additional die space is used to enable things that weren't practical before instead of just making all the existing features twice as fast.wumpus - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
That is only strictly true if you are willing to use twice as much electricity and generate/remove twice as much heat (it could approach costing twice as much as well, but not nearly as often). A good chunk of each update needs to go to making the GPU have a higher TFLOP/W or the thing will melt.ewood - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
luckily many of those issues are mitigated by transition to a smaller process node, as DanNeeley said. your statement is more applicable to dual die cards, not new processors having twice the functional units.maltanar - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
That is unfortunately no longer true, smaller processes do not benefit from the so-called 'Dennard scaling' anymore, without a lot of trickery from semiconductor engineers.DanNeely - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
They may have to work harder at it; but as long as they're able to continue doing what you refer to as trickery, the result for us end users is the same.tential - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
CPU gains have been made, just not in performance. We don't need performance on the CPU side for a LOT of applications. Like I always say, if you had double the CPU performance, you still wouldn't gain much FPS in most games.Intel would be cannibalizing it's higher end processors if it kept making CPU gains. Instead, it focuses on power consumption, to fit better CPUs into smaller things such as notebooks, tablets, etc. Look at the Macbook Air Review and then tell me we haven't made CPU gains.
UltraTech79 - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
More worthwhile than what? What are you even talking about? Today's i5 chips arnt the bottleneck to any of the GPUs here in any game. So what you're saying is irrelevant.ericore - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
Aint that the truth, the biggest change was from the 500 series to the 600 series.The 600 series make most radeons look like dinosaurs or AMD processors.
Intel is dicking around giving us less than 10% speed inprovement in each generation.
Can't wait for AMD to release their steamroller 8 core, except where latency is crucial it will match haswell and cost a fraction. Haswell will still technically be faster, but only in benchmarks, in practice they will be identical. The change from piledriver to steamroller is like from a a pentium 4 to a core 2 duo. It's not a new architecture, but has so many improvements that it ought to be called one.
MarcVenice - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I checked all the games, and the first 4-5 games the 7950 Boost wins, the other the GTX 760 wins. I didn't add up the numbers, but are you guys sure the HD 7950 Boost is 8% slower overall?And what's anandtech's stance on frametimes/fcat? Are those only used when problems arise, new games? I realize they take a lot of time, but I think they can be quite valuable in determing which card is the fastest.