The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Review
by Ryan Smith on November 7, 2013 9:01 AM ESTBioshock Infinite
Bioshock Infinite is Irrational Games’ latest entry in the Bioshock franchise. Though it’s based on Unreal Engine 3 – making it our obligatory UE3 game – Irrational had added a number of effects that make the game rather GPU-intensive on its highest settings. As an added bonus it includes a built-in benchmark composed of several scenes, a rarity for UE3 engine games, so we can easily get a good representation of what Bioshock’s performance is like.
As opposed to our previous game, with Bioshock the GTX 780 Ti comes out at a very strong contender, easily surpassing everything AMD and NVIDIA. Here we see it best AMD’s best by 18%, and against GTX Titan and GTX 780 it’s 7% and 20% ahead respectively. Though admittedly everything here is averaging better than 60fps at this point.
Meanwhile for the AFR matchup, with a pair of GTX 780 Ti’s we’re either looking framerates that will make a 120Hz gamer happy, or enough horsepower to take on 4K at our highest settings and still come out well ahead. At 57.3fps the GTX 780 Ti is several frames per second ahead of the 290X CF, coming up just short of averaging 60fps even at this very high resolution.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
302 Comments
View All Comments
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