NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 Review: The New Enthusiast Kepler
by Ryan Smith on June 25, 2013 9:00 AM ESTFinal Thoughts
Bringing things to a close, in the last month NVIDIA has launched three different video cards, carving out the GeForce GTX 700 series. As the final and cheapest card in that launch window, GTX 760 is going to be the most affordable and highest volume card, and also the card that that will face the most competition from AMD. By launching a refresh card at a time when AMD is going to be sitting it out, NVIDIA essentially gets to dictate in what environment their products will launch and what their competition will be. NVIDIA doesn’t get to rewrite the laws of physics and is ultimately beholden to GPU clockspeeds, power consumption, and yields like anyone else, but they can still exercise a great deal of control through the clockspeeds and prices they set.
To that end this launch is a great deal like the GTX 770 launch last month, with NVIDIA improving performance, lowering prices, and putting AMD on the defensive all at the same time. Thanks to these performance improvements and price cuts, the GTX 760 ends up coming within 3% of the soon to be retired GTX 670 and easily surpasses the GTX 660 Ti, all the while coming in at a price well below both at $249. Like most mid-cycle upgrades this is more about bringing existing performance levels down to new prices, and to that end NVIDIA has delivered on those goals. Ultimately it’s not a new level of performance, but it’s a new price for what a few months ago would cost $350 or more.
With that said, like any good refresh the presence of the 700 series and the retirement of the 600 series looks to shake up the market, and once more AMD is going to be on the receiving end here. Rather unlike the GTX 770 versus the 7970 GHz Edition, the GTX 760 is not tied with any AMD product. At 1080p it is clearly ahead of both the stock and boost versions of the 7950, by 13% and 8% respectively. This is by no means a commanding lead and AMD still offers better performance in some cases, but on average the GTX 760 is faster, quieter, and $30-$50 cheaper than AMD’s closest competitor.
As a result the competitive landscape is clearly in NVIDIA’s favor for the time being. AMD has their Never Settle Reloaded bundle to boost the value of the 7950, and if this was a repeat of the GTX 660 Ti launch – where the two cards were tied – then that strategy would be solid. Ultimately with such a large game bundle only the individual buyer can truly assign a value to AMD’s bundle, but in this case we believe AMD can’t afford to be slower and more expensive at the same time. At current prices NVIDIA’s GTX 760 has AMD beat, in essence repeating the GTX 670 launch by once more undercutting the 7950.
Wrapping things up, having established the GTX 760’s current control of the $250 price point let’s talk about the wider market for the GTX 760. As a mid-cycle refresh the performance gains over the 600 series won’t knock anyone’s socks off, but then like most mid-cycle refreshes this isn’t a product targeted at existing 600 series owners. Rather this is targeted at buyers looking to upgrade their older 55nm/40nm generation video cards, or with the recent launch of Haswell, putting together a new system outright.
With a $249 price tag the GTX 760 is most straightforward successor to enthusiast cards like the GTX 560 Ti and GTX 460 1GB. In the case of the former, now one full cycle old, the performance gains are solid, with GTX 760 improving on the GTX 560 Ti by about 67%. This isn’t exceptional by any means (the GTX 570 to GTX 770 was 75%) but it’s about average for a 2 year (generational) improvement. Otherwise for a true doubling we’ll have to wait for one more year, as evidenced by the better than 100% performance gains over the 3 year old GTX 460 1GB.
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Ryan Smith - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Going by my chart, I have the GTX 760 winning in 7 of 10 games (all but DiRT, Hitman, and Crysis 1) at our highest 1080p quality settings, which is where I'm focusing on for a card this expensive. Of those magnitude matters; most of those GTX 760 wins are in the double digits, so the average does indeed end up being 8%As for frametimes, the idea is that we would normally include them. That said this review left us crunched for time; I would have likely needed to drop the Fermi cards to make time. With that in mind, there's absolutely nothing interesting going on with single-GPU frametimes right now with the games we use. The only place NVIDIA still differ are under multi-GPU scenarios.
Zstream - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Shouldn't we be using the median instead of average?ewood - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
median, mean and mode all show very different things. you should have all three to draw detailed conclusions, however if only one is available i would personally prefer it be the mean.ShieTar - Thursday, June 27, 2013 - link
With a sample size of 10, the median would not be a very helpful information. To be honest, the mean is not all the important either. The distribution of performances is not all that random when comparing nVidia and AMD, but rather there are significant preferences for one architecture by each game.So everybody on the lookout for a new card should mainly be checking for a benchmark specifically on the game he/she spends the most time with. For this reason, I would love to see the benchmarks on Anandtech include the name of the engine for each game (if it is a licensed one), and maybe provide some handy reference to figure out what other games use the same reference.
And personally, as a player who does not play reaction-based games like shooters or racers a lot, I would love AT to re-introduce a BioWare and/or Blizzard title back into their benchmark-zoo. Even if those are not extremely new or demanding, I think they still have a high importance for a large number of players who don't care much to shoot virtual people in their virtual faces.
MarcVenice - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I see, I counted Sleeping Dogs as a win for the HD 7950 as well, considering the minimum fps is a bit higher. Thanks for the reply, I agree that if all is well with frametimes in a certain game, fraps is still a good way to measure raw rendering power.JeBarr - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Most multi-GPU users are reporting that the frame time issue mostly exists for 2-way SLI and Quad SLI. It seems that 3-way SLI or Dual GPU single slot SLI is the way to go for gamers concerned about the stutters. I'm not sure about 4-way SLI though, since I don't bother with it anymore. I can however, confirm that in my personal experience a single GPU or 3-way SLI is mostly unaffected.draknon - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
This seems like a good spot to upgrade from my 460gtxEzioAs - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Yeah, it is. My original plan was to get the GTX 760, but Nvidia delayed it and I wasn't going to wait anymore, so I went and bought the GTX 660.DanNeely - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I'm tempted to upgrade to it from my 560 when I built a Haswell box later this summer and put the difference between it and a higher end card toward a better SSD, etc and then get a top end Maxwell based card next year.I'm a bit concerned about ending up in the same trap I did last time though. I bought the 560 as a stopgap replacement in Jan 2012 after stupidity killed my 5870, with the intent of upgrading to a GK100 based card in half a year or so only to have nVidia fumble its top end launch.
omarccx - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
It seems like an even greater upgrade from my HD4000. :x