The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Review
by Ryan Smith on November 7, 2013 9:01 AM ESTMetro: Last Light
As always, kicking off our look at performance is 4A Games’ latest entry in their Metro series of subterranean shooters, Metro: Last Light. The original Metro: 2033 was a graphically punishing game for its time and Metro: Last Light is in its own right too. On the other hand it scales well with resolution and quality settings, so it’s still playable on lower end hardware.
For the bulk of our analysis we’re going to be focusing on our 2560x1440 results, as monitors at this resolution will be what we expect a single GTX 780 Ti to be primarily used with. A single card does have the necessary horsepower to drive a 4K monitor on its own, but only at lower quality settings. Even as powerful as GTX 780 Ti is, a pair of them will be needed to get good framerates out of most games if using 4K at high quality settings.
Looking at our Metro: Last Light results then, it’s the start of what’s going to be a fairly consistent streak for the GTX 780 Ti. Though it doesn’t improve on GTX Titan or GTX 780’s gaming performance by leaps and bounds, the additional SMX and increased clockspeeds means that it has little trouble pulling away from those cards and from AMD’s 290 series. As a result the GTX 780 Ti beats the GTX Titan by 11%, GTX 780 by 19%, and though it’s closer than normal, the lead over the 290X stands at 6%.
To that end in Metro it leads the pack of single-GPU cards, though it does come up just short of being able to average 60 frames per second at 2560. Anything over 60fps will require multiple GPUs; and even then GTX 780 Ti is fast enough that sometimes even a pair of GPUs (GTX 770 SLI) isn’t going to be appreciably faster.
Meanwhile looking at GTX 780 Ti SLI performance, the SLI setup tops the charts at 2560 for everything short of the 290X in uber mode, though in this case (like most cases) two high-end GPUs is on the verge of being overkill even at 2560. Otherwise looking at 4K, NVIDIA’s poor 4K scaling on Metro once again makes itself present here, with NVIDIA’s performance only minimally benefitting from the second card. In the case of Metro at 4K, the 290X CF is going to be by far the faster option.
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A5 - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
BF4 has a built-in benchmark too, but I have no idea how good it is. I'd guess they're waiting on a patch?If nothing else, there will be BF4 results if/when that Mantle update comes out.
IanCutress - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
BF4 has a built in benchmark tool? I can't find any reference to one.Ryan Smith - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
BF3 will ultimately get replaced with BF4 later this month. For the moment with all of the launches in the past few weeks, we haven't yet had the time to sit down and validate BF4, let alone collect all of the necessary data.1Angelreloaded - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Hell man people run FEAR still as a benchmark because of how brutal it is against GPU/CPU/HDD.Bakes - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
I think it's better to wait until driver performance stabilizes for new applications before basing benchmarks on them. If you don't then early benchmark numbers become useless for comparison sake.TheJian - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
I would argue warhead needs to go. Servers for that game have been EMPTY for ages and ZERO people play it. You can ask to add BF4, but to remove BF3 given warhead is included (while claiming bf3 old) is ridiculous. How old is Warhead? 7-8 years? People still play BF3. A LOT of people. I would argue they need to start benchmarking based on game sales.Starcraft2, Diablo3, World of Warcraft Pandaria, COD Black ops 2, SplinterCell Blacklist, Assassins Creed 3 etc etc... IE, black ops 2 has over 5x the sales of Hitman Absolution. Which one should you be benchmarking?
Warhead...OLD.
Grid 2 .03 total sales for PC says vgchartz
StarCraft 2 5.2.mil units (just PC).
Which do you think should be benchmarked?
Even Crysis 3 only has .27mil units says vgchartz.
Diablo 3? ROFL...3.18mil for PC. So again, 11.5x Crysis 3.
Why are we not benchmarking games that are being sold in the MILLIONS of units?
WOW still has 7 million people playing and it can slow down a lot with tons of people doing raids etc.
TheinsanegamerN - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
because any halfway decent machine can run WoW? they use the most demanding games to show how powerful the gpu really is. 5760x1080p with 4xMSAA gets 69 FPS with the 780ti.why benchmark hitman over black ops? simple, it is not what we call demanding.
they use demanding games. not the super popular games thatll run on hardware from 3 years ago.
powerarmour - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Well, that time on the throne for the 290X lasted about as long as Ned Stark...Da W - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
I look at 4K gaming since i play in 3X1 eyefinity (being +/- 3.5K gaming).At these resolution i see an average of 1FPS lead for 780Ti over 290X. For 200$ more.
Power consumption is about the same.
And as far as temperature go, it's temperature AT THE CHIP level. Both cards will heat your room equally if they consume as much power.
The debate is really about the cooler, and Nvidia got an outright lead as far as cooling goes.
JDG1980 - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
It seems to me that both Nvidia and AMD are charging too much of a price premium for their top-end cards. The GTX 780 Ti isn't worth $200 more than the standard GTX 780, and the R9 290X isn't worth $150 more than the standard R9 290.For gamers who want a high-end product but don't want to unnecessarily waste money, it seems like the real competition is between the R9 290 ($399) and the GTX 780 ($499). At the moment the R9 290 has noise issues, but once non-reference cards become available (supposedly by the end of this month), AMD should hold a comfortable lead. That said, the Titan Cooler is indeed a really nice piece of industrial design, and I can see someone willing to pay a bit extra for it.