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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DanNeely - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
The 8800 Ultra was a $650 card. Ignoring the Titan we're back where we were 7 years ago.nsiboro - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
AMD delaying Sea Island until Q3'2013...I just feel someone over @AMD is crazy and didn't think thru end users' point of view.
With the release of Haswell, many will be putting together new boxes and the "new" GPU they'll get will be gtx760/770/780. AMD losing fans and revenue... *sigh*
silverblue - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I'm not sure I follow. Haswell doesn't appear to have amazed that many people - you could get away with an SB or IB build which overclock enough to make up the performance difference. If you already have one of those, with proper cooling you don't need to save money for a marginally better CPU - spend it on graphics instead.DanNeely - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
It's not the SB/IB people upgrading; it's those of us with first generation i5/i7 systems or even older core 2 quads pulling the trigger now. AMD is out of the race except at the bottom and it's probably going to be two more years before Intel offers anything else worth mentioning on the desktop. (No socketed Broadwell chips, and assuming IVB-e and Haswell-e are as underwhelming at the $3xx pricepoint as SB-e is.)Dark_wizzie - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I wished it included a benchmark with Skyrim on 2560x1440, with the hardcore texture mods on, AA/AS on pretty high with Ultra. Debating between this ($250), 7970... ($310!!!), 770 ($400)Ryan Smith - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
You request will be taken under consideration, but I'll tell you right now that you shouldn't expect it to happen. One of the tenets of our testing methods is that we don't test with mods; they're often not optimized (or worse, optimized only for the developer's system) and frequently updated (making our benchmarks useless). Plus the number of users on any given mod is very low, which would mean our benchmarks wouldn't be very applicable to most of our readers.edlee - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
something tells me if you SLI two GTX 760 it would destroy the GTX 780 at a lesser pricexTRICKYxx - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
Google some benchmarks. It goes toe-to-toe with the GTX 690 and Titan in every game I've seen. All for $500... Good deal!GTan - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Hopefully I will be building my first PC ever in a few weeks, I'm glad that Nvidia released the 760, since the 770 at $400+ is too expensive for me. My budget for my PC is $800-900. I was originally 90% sure I was gonna buy the GTX 760, $250 is a great price, but now since I've seen deals for the 7970 for as low as $300, I'm wondering is it worth it for pay a extra $50 for the 7970 (plus the 4 games). End question, what is a better value for the newb PC builder: a $250 GTX 760 or a $300 7970? Thanks!thesavvymage - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
if you want the games, 7970. If not, id go wit hthe 760 for being quieter and using less power