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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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.