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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1Angelreloaded - Saturday, November 16, 2013 - link
False I Hit the 3.5 Gb limit quite a few times due to it being a 32 bit game, now if they are 64bit games then yes they will use more than 3GB for textures and draw distance , but meh you know what your talking about.......right.ahlan - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
Damage control Nvidia fanboy! Nvidia fanboys are delusional as MS and Apple fanboys...Keep paying more for the same performance...
dylan522p - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Not at all. In quiet more. It runs hotter, is louder 95% of the time and is using more power.dylan522p - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
And performs significantly worse.DMCalloway - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Definition of upsetting: Early gtx 780 adopters now able to purchase a 'true' gtx 780 at the same price point previous gtx 780's were at launch. Nvidia sat back, took everyone's cash, and now to remain competitive finally release a fully enabled chip..... wowSpunjji - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
I think early adopters on both sides got dicked here. The R9 290 makes everything else look like a joke in terms of pricing, for all its manifest flaws.dylan522p - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
I would rather not have the 480v2, in my machine.Yojimbo - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
And next year they'll release something even faster at the same price point. You can't have both increasing performance/price over time and also not have your new hardware become a comparatively bad deal in the future. People who bought the GTX 780 when it came out got 5 to 6 months of use of the card in exchange for a card which is now ~15% slower than what's available at the same price point.ShieTar - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
In other words: Nvidia did what absolutely every other CPU & GPU provider has also done over the last 30 years? Wow indeed.Everybody wants to bring the most profitable product possible to the market. That means, you need to be good enough to interest customers and cheap enough to be affordable. And you don't get better or cheaper, unless something changes the market, e.g. competition.
extide - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
You stated the 290x is "unable to compete with an older architecture." That is false. LOL