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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dwade123 - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
Only morons will buy current gen cards on steroids.MLSCrow - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
Never in all my life of being a supporter of Anandtech have I been so disgusted by the overly obvious bias toward NVidia. The GTX780Ti is a JOKE at $700.just4U - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
As much as I hate to admit this.. I "DO" like to see AMD succeed.. that being said I don't favor them over NVidia.. and Anandtech's reviews are fair/balanced. I think all reviewers have a preference.. and sometimes that shows in their reviews.. but it's really hard to pinpoint what Ryan's are. The guy can't win with NVidia or AMD die-hard fans. He gets criticized for being a fanboy of both.Ranger101 - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
I hear you, I have followed Anandtech for decades but this kind of rubbish is definitely making me think about looking at other tech sites for a balanced perspective...shame on you Anandtech.Ranger101 - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
At 4K resolutions the R290X beats 780Ti every time. How is it possible to conclude that 780Ti is 11% faster than R290X when the former card is consistently beaten at 4K resolutions which is the ultimate test of a cards speed? How much is Nvidia paying you to write this junk?polaco - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
Indeed that performance difference is very tricky. In most cases they are head to head. And for 150 bucks less it's a no brainer 290X is the winner. However 290 seems so sweet at that price that puts me into real doubt if 290X is worthy. Radeon 290 looks lovely.Yojimbo - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
He explains his reasoning quite clearly, and I think the reasoning is sound. 4K resolution is still out of the reach of a single-GPU card, because in order to achieve it, one must either accept painfully low frame rates, or run on extremely low quality settings, no matter what single-GPU card is chosen. Neither of these options makes much sense, but if you wish to take advantage of them, the data is there and you are free to ignore his analysis and pursue your own; Buy a 290X and a 4K monitor. But in terms of "victory" for AMD, it seems to me that running 4K somewhat faster, but still not fast enough to be usable, is meaningless.Jaboobins - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
The memory frequency for the GTX 770 is wrong. It needs to be 7Ghz not 6Ghz.But damn is that 780 GTX ti is fast!
wwwcd - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
I got a rumour for r9 290x with 8GB 7+ GHz GDDR5 VRAM. WoW!, if that will be made real the card be have twice speed bandwidth than normal refferent r9 290x. GTX 780 will be downed to ground. Hardly ;)slickr - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
At $700 its a bit too expensive, especially when you consider it averages only about 5% increase in performance over the Titan and about 9% increase in performance over the 780, which when translated to raw numbers, its only 3-4 frames.I mean whether a game runs at 50 or 54 frames is of no significance, especially if you have to pay $200 more for it.
I think the 780 Ti is good in its own right, but its just not good enough when compared to the competition and when you consider the price.
The 290x is $550 and in some cases is still faster than the 780 Ti, all this with a terribly designed cooler, which will be replaced by custom coolers by 3rd party in the next week or two.
So at this point we are looking at a $550 290x with a custom cooler that will be able to run even faster with a better cooler, which means beating the new 780 Ti in many benchmarks and drawing in others all at $150 less.
So yeah, Nvidia may have released a slightly faster card than the 780 and Titan, but considering the price and what the competition is offering, it isn't very appealing.
If it launched at $600 it may have been reasonable and you have a 10% slower 780 at $500 and in between the 290x at $550 and it could make sense to go for the 780Ti, but right now I don't really see the appeal.