The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Review
by Ryan Smith on November 7, 2013 9:01 AM ESTCrysis 3
Still one of our most punishing benchmarks, Crysis 3 needs no introduction. With Crysis 3, Crytek has gone back to trying to kill computers and still holds “most punishing shooter” title in our benchmark suite. Only in a handful of setups can we even run Crysis 3 at its highest (Very High) settings, and that’s still without AA. Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to drive games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2013.
Crysis 3 is another strong title for NVIDIA, leading to GTX 780 Ti easily taking the top spot at 2560 for single-GPU setups. At 62.4fps it’s the first and only card fast enough to deliver better than 60fps despite Crysis 3’s punishing rendering workload, and in the process outperforms the 290X by about 20%. Even 7990, the closest thing to single-card competition for the GTX 780 Ti, is still only less than 2fps ahead.
Meanwhile throwing on another GTX 780 Ti will further improve performance here, though with shaky results for NVIDIA. At 2560 this is enough to crack 100fps, but at a 4K NVIDIA’s SLI scaling starts coming up short. The difference in scaling becomes so great that the 290X closes the gap and then some, leading to the 290X CF taking the lead. Given the fact that the GTX 780 Ti SLI is largely overkill for anything but these high resolutions, this weaker scaling undercuts the practicality of going with a GTX 780’s Ti SLI in these situations.
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Tetracycloide - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Hardware vendors get much better prices than that which is why you so often find third party coolers on custom cards for a fairly modest markup ($10-20).nathanddrews - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
The Arctic Accelero Xtreme III that Tom's used was only $70, but even if it was $100 extra, that's still a $150 gap. For vendors, subtract the cost of the bad cooler from the good cooler and I'll bet we see dual/tri-fan 290s for under $450.Also, this is interesting:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-290-...
Mithan - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Great card, but about $150 over priced. I would purchase this for $550 right now, but $700? No.1Angelreloaded - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Maxwell is due out next year, so tbh this would be a bad bandwagon to jump on, an architechure change and possible die shrink will come next year and depending on yields I would anticipate a 10-15% jump in the next series with lower tdp.kwrzesien - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Maybe even at $600. $700? No.Nirvanaosc - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Great review, but the Overclocking section still has the same text as the R9 290 review.piroroadkill - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
290 and 290X look even better in this when used in CF. They scale better than 780Ti in SLI.You can save even more with 290X CF than 780Ti, AND get better performance in almost every test listed.
With that setup you'd be wise in either case to get a nice custom cooling loop anyway.
Gast - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
1st paragraph of the conclusion. "NVIDIA’s high-end cards a bit faster and a big cheaper each time."Should be "a bit cheaper each time".
Pneumothorax - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Sad, this goes to show that Nvidia was selling us mid-range Keplers all last year at premium prices. This card is what the GTX 680 should've been all along. OTOH, if the 7970 was priced much better out of the gate, it might've forced the green team not to have ripped us off so much.EJS1980 - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
If Nvidia released this as their answer to the 7970, AMD would have simply gone out of business. Maybe AMD should thank NVidia for showing them mercy, and keeping them afloat...j/k!