The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Review
by Ryan Smith on November 7, 2013 9:01 AM ESTGRID 2
The final game in our benchmark suite is also our racing entry, Codemasters’ GRID 2. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, and with GRID 2 they’ve gone back to racing on the pavement, bringing to life cities and highways alike. Based on their in-house EGO engine, GRID 2 includes a DirectCompute based advanced lighting system in its highest quality settings, which incurs a significant performance penalty but does a good job of emulating more realistic lighting within the game world.
When it comes to GRID even cranking up the game’s quality settings to maximum hardly does anything to slow down our cards. At 90fps the GTX 780 Ti once again takes the top spot while delivering an extremely high framerate. This ultimately puts the GTX 780 Ti ahead of the 290X by 13%, while also beating the other GK110 cards by a bit more than average at 11% for GTX Titan and 23% for GTX 780.
Otherwise, moving on to 4K and multi-GPU setups, NVIDIA’s limited scaling once more becomes an issue. At 50fps for a single GTX 780 Ti NVIDIA starts off well enough, but we still need a second GPU to get above 60fps. And though GTX 780 Ti SLI will get us there, 290X CF and AMD’s superior scaling will get AMD there with room to spare.
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will1956 - Monday, December 2, 2013 - link
troll but trueRajiv Kishore - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Waiting on 290 with better cooling, will ask my sis to pick 1 up when she's coming back to india. Nvidia 780ti is overkill for my 1080p screen. Gj nvidia can't wait for maxwell! Still single gpu king.HalloweenJack - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
So it uses as much power as the R290X , its thermal load is set lower and its nearly as noisy under load. but its faster and costs a lot more.R290 is the winner here - $200 cheaper , add an aftermarket cooler or wait for the AIB to be unleashed , and for less money you`ll have a faster (factory overclocked , or oc yourself) R290 which beats the 780Ti
A5 - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
1) A 3dB difference means that the R290X in "standard" mode is twice as loud as the 780 Ti.2) In "Uber" mode, which is what the 290X has to use to match performance, it is 8dB louder. That is a huge difference.
Traciatim - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
A5, that point 1 is incorrect. 3dB is twice the power but not twice as loud. 3dB is about where anyone can perceive a loudness difference, 10dB is generally what is perceived as twice as loud.tedders - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
While the results speak for themselves, I cannot wait to see what a properly air cooled 290X will be able to do against a 780ti. It has pretty much shown that the stock reference cooler on the 290X is its bottleneck. Will you be revisiting the 290X review once the other manufactures come out with their properly cooled cards?pyroHusk - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Completely agree with you, R9 290X clock rate throttle so much by the crap reference cooler. Reviewer from techspot replace R9 290 reference cooler with HIS IceQ X2 from R9 280X and temperature drop to 60-70C easily.nathanddrews - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Tom's also replaced the 290 cooler with a tri-fan setup and saw a 20% fps gain without all the noise. Seems to me that a $400 290 + a high quality cooler ($50?) will get you close to the 780ti for $250 less.hoboville - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Once reviews from both sides come in (when both sides come out with third-party coolers), then we can see how these cards stack up. Right now, the AMD cards can't be realistically overclocked (or in the case of the 290X realistically reach its innate performance). The numbers from Tom's hardware are promising, but who knows what ASUS and the rest will pull out of their hats.Hopefully by mid December we can make good informed decisions, but for now, it's just too early to buy. There's still rumors that Never Settle will come into the picture, so waiting is good.
IanCutress - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
A high quality VGA air cooler is more like $100-$120. Or strap on a closed loop liquid cooler