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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MrSpadge - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
To be fair GTX650Ti Boost consumes ~100 W in the real world. Still a huge improvement!NikosD - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
Hello.I have a few questions regarding HTPC and video decoding.
Can we say that we a new video processor from Nvidia, a new name like VP6 or more like a VP5.x ?
How Nvidia is calling the new video decoder ?
Why don't you add a 4K60 fps clip in order to test soon to be released HDMI 2.0 output ?
If you run a benchmark using DXVA Checker between VP5 and VP6 (?) how much faster is VP6 in H.264 1080p, 4K clips ?
Thanks!
Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 20, 2014 - link
NVIDIA doesn't have a name for it; at least not one they're sharing with us.NikosD - Thursday, February 20, 2014 - link
Thanks.Is it possible to try a 4K60fps with Maxwell ?
I wonder if it can decode it in realtime...
Flunk - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
I think these will be a lot more exciting in laptops. Even if they're no where near Nvidia's claimed 2x Kepler efficiency per watt. On the desktop it's not really that big a deal. The top-end chip will probably be ~40% faster than the 780TI but that will be a while.dylan522p - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
the 880 will be much more powerful than the 780ti. More than 40% even. They could literally die shrink and throw a few more SMX's and the 40% would be achieved. I would imagine either they are gonna have a HUGE jump (80% +) or they are gonna do what they did with Kepler and release a 200W Sku that is about 50% faster and when 20nm yields are good enough have the 900 series come with 250W Skus.Kevin G - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
Very impressive performance for its power consumption. I can see an underclocked version of this card coming with a passive cooler for HTPC solutions. Perhaps that'd be a hypothetical GT740? I'm surprised that nVidia hasn't launched a mobile version of this chip. It seems like it'd be ideal for midrange laptops that still have discrete graphics.I suspect that the extra overclocking headroom is in reserve for a potential rebrand to a GTX 800 series product. (Though a straight die shrink of this design to 20 nm would provide even more headroom for a GTX 800/900 card.) nVidia could have held back to keep it below the more expensive GTX 660.
Though ultimately I'm left wanting the bigger GM100 and GM104 chips. We're going to have to wait until 20 nm is ready but considering the jump Maxwell has provided in the low end of the market, I'm eager to see what it can do in the high end.
DanNeely - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
ASUS has a 65W TDP GT 640 with a big 2 slot passive heat sink (GT640-DCSL-2GD3); with the 750 Ti only hitting 60W a passive version of it should be possible at near stock performance. I suspect the 740 will be a farther cut down 3 SMM model which might allow a single slot passive design.PhoenixEnigma - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
Passive cooling was my first thought as well - I've been looking for something to replace the 6770 in my HTPC with, and I wanted something both faster and passively cooled. There are already passive 7750s on the market, and the numbers in Bench put the 750Ti at about 9W more than then 7750 under real world load, so a vanilla 750 with a passive cooler should be entirely possible. Even a 750Ti might be doable, but that could be pushing things a little far.evilspoons - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
I need a new half-height HTPC card, my 2.5 year old Asus Radeon 6570 bit the dust last month (sparkly picture, one particular shade of grey turned random colours). If they can work out the kinks in this thing and underclock it a bit, it sounds like a good candidate.It feels like it's been a long time since anything new showed up in the half-height video card game.