The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti and GTX 750 Review: Maxwell Makes Its Move
by Ryan Smith & Ganesh T S on February 18, 2014 9:00 AM ESTHTPC Aspects : Introduction
Home Theater PC (HTPC) enthusiasts keep close tabs on launch of discrete GPUs which don't need a PCIe power connector. Such cards make it easy to upgrade an old PC with a low-wattage PSU into a multimedia powerhouse. Over the last decade or so, GPUs have implemented HTPC functionalities in response to consumer demand as well as changing / expected market trends. In the beginning, we had hardware acceleration for decode of MPEG-2. This was followed by H.264 / VC-1 acceleration (thanks to the emergence of Blu-rays), HD audio bitstreaming and 3D video support. More recently, we had support for playback and decode of videos in 4K resolution.
4K presents tangible benefits to consumers (unlike 3D), and market adoption is rapidly growing. In many respects, this is similar to how people migrated to 720p and 1080i TV sets when vendors started promoting high definition (HD). We know that these early adopters were stuck with expensive CRT-based TVs when the LCD-based 1080p sets came to the market at very reasonable prices. While there is no 'CRT-to-LCD'-like sea-change in the horizon, the imminent launch of HDMI '2.0' (The HDMI consortium wants to do away with version numbers for reasons known only to them) with 4Kp60 capability and display sinks fully compliant with that standard needs to be kept in mind by end users.
In the near future, it is expected that most of the 4K material reaching consumers will be encoded in H.264. Consumer devices such as the GoPro cameras still record 4K in that codec only. From a HTPC GPU perspective, it is imperative that we have support for 4K H.264 decoding. In fact, most real-time encoding activities would utilize H.264, but, a good HEVC (H.265) encoder would definitely be more efficient in terms of bitrate. The problem is that it is very difficult to make a good HEVC encoder operate in real-time. Archiving content wouldn't be a problem, though. So, it can be expected that content from streaming services / local backup (where the encoding is done offline) will move to HEVC first. A future-proof HTPC GPU would be capable of HEVC decode too.
Where does the Maxwell-based 750Ti stand when the above factors are taken into account? Make no mistake, the NVIDIA GT 640 happens to be our favourite HTPC GPU when 4K-capability is considered an absolute necessity. On paper, the 750Ti appears to be a great candidate to take over the reins from the GT 640. In order to evaluate the HTPC credentials, we put the 750Ti to test against the Zotac GT 640 as well as the Sapphire Radeon HD 7750.
In our HTPC coverage, we first look at GPU support for network streaming services, followed by hardware decoder performance for local file playback. This section also covers madVR. In the third section, we take a look some of the miscellaneous HTPC aspects such as refresh rate accuracy and hardware encoder performance.
The HTPC credentials of the cards were evaluated using the following testbed configuration:
| NVIDIA GT 750Ti HTPC Testbed Setup | |
| Processor / GPU | Intel Core i7-3770K - 3.50 GHz (Turbo to 3.9 GHz) |
| NVIDIA GT 750Ti / Zotac GT 640 / Sapphire Radeon HD 7750 | |
| Motherboard | Asus P8H77-M Pro uATX |
| OS Drive | Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TB |
| Secondary Drive | OCZ Vertex 2 60 GB SSD + Corsair P3 128 GB SSD |
| Memory | G.SKILL ECO Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) F3-10666CL7D-4GBECO CAS 9-9-9-24 |
| Case | Antec VERIS Fusion Remote Max |
| Power Supply | Antec TruePower New TP-550 550W |
| Operating System | Windows 8.1 Pro |
| Display / AVR | |
| Sony KDL46EX720 + Pioneer Elite VSX-32 | |
| Acer H243H | |
| Graphics Drivers | GeForce v334.69 / Catalyst 14.1 Beta |
| Softwares | CyberLink PowerDVD 13 |
| MPC-HC 1.7.3 | |
| madVR 0.87.4 | |
All the three cards were evaluated using the same hardware and software configuration. The Sapphire Radeon HD 7750 has an advantage in the power consumption department thanks to its passive cooling system. Other than that, we are doing apples-to-apples comparison when talking about power consumption numbers for various activities in the next few sections.
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Mondozai - Wednesday, February 19, 2014 - link
USA in recession? You are either ignorant or use your own home-cooked economics for "special" people like yourself.As for consoles. Sure you can get low-end cards for cheaper sums a PC but people buy consoles for their games, simplicity and the fact that they are increasingly multimedia machines for a low cost.
These factors will not change with these new cards.
Yojimbo - Wednesday, February 19, 2014 - link
I thought I remember reading a headline a while back that said Sony or Microsoft or both were not planning on selling their hardware for a loss this time...madmilk - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
The launch PS3 cost over $800 to manufacture, and Sony lost something like $3 billion in the first two years from hardware sales even though the PS3 wasn't even selling that well. To a lesser extent, Microsoft had the same problem with the Xbox 360. Of course Sony and Microsoft would go for cheaper, mid-range off-the-shelf components this time around. No one wants to make the same mistake twice.Antronman - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
Wow. What do they think, everybody here is an OC pro who has/had world records and has a monster closed loop browsing/gaming/work setup? I don't give a damn about lower power consumption if it means I have to OC the balls off the card!moozoo - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
Please include at least one fp64 benchmark in the compute section.It is great that you found out and reported the fp64 ratio.
Its a pity there isn't at least one low power low profile card with good DP Gflops (at least enough to beat the CPU and form a compelling argument to switch API's)
At work we only get small form factor PCs, and asking for anything that looks different ends in politics.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 20, 2014 - link
For the moment FP64 data is available via Bench. This being a mainstream consumer card, it's purposely not built for high FP64 performance; FP64 is there for compatibility purposes rather than being able to do much in the way of useful work.This is a purposeful market segmentation move that won't be going anywhere. So cards such as the 750 Ti will always be very slow at FP64.
jrs77 - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
Now we need a manufacturer to release a GTX750 with single-slot cooler.koolanceGamer - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
While all of this "low power" stuff is a little boring to me (not that anything is really pushing the high end card) I hope that in the not too distant future even the video cards like the 780/Titan will be able to be powered by the PCI alone.I would love to do a gaming build with a PCI based SSD and no cables coming off the video cards, it would be so clean!
EdgeOfDetroit - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
Well I want laser light circuit cables. So much faster than copper and they would look so clean, you wouldn't even know there was a cable there unless you put your hand into the laser beams to see the pretty lights...... Ahh crap another BSOD, these laser cables suck!
Devo2007 - Wednesday, February 19, 2014 - link
Starting to wonder what a good card to replace a GTX 560 Ti would be (that's still relatively affordable). Would I have to step up to something like the R9 270 or GTX 760 cards to make things worthwhile? The power savings of the GTX 750 Ti aren't really a big factor as I'm currently using a 650w PSU, but I also don't want to spend a ton of money.