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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TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
Look at sapphire's 7750. superior in every way to the 6570, and is single slot low profile. and overclocks like a champ.dj_aris - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
Sure but it's cooler is kind of loud. Definitely NOT a silent HTPC choice. Maybe a LP 750 would be better.evilspoons - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
Thanks for pointing that out. None of my local computer stores sell that, but I took a look on MSI's site and sure enough, there it is. They also seem to have an updated version of the same card being sold as an R7 250, although I'm not sure there's any real difference or if it's just a new sticker on the same GPU. Clock speeds, PCB design, and heat sink are the same, anyway.Sabresiberian - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
I'm hoping the power efficiency means the video cards at the high end will get a performance boost because they are able to cram more SMMs on the die than SMXs were used in Kepler solutions. This of course assumes the lower power spec means less heat as well.I do think we will see a significant performance increase when the flagship products are released.
As far as meeting DX11.1/11.2 standards - it would be interesting to hear from game devs how much this effects them. Nvidia has never been all that interested in actually meeting all the requirements for Microsoft to give them official status for DX versions, but that doesn't mean the real-world visual quality is reduced. In the end what I care about is visual quality; if it causes them to lose out compared to AMD's offerings, I will jump ship in a heartbeat. So far that hasn't been the case though.
Krysto - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
Yeah, I'm hoping for a 10 Teraflops Titan, so I can get to pair with my Oculus Rift next year!Kevin G - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
nVidia has been quite aggressive with the main DirectX version. They heavily pushed DX10 back in day with the Geforce 8000/9000 series. They do tend to de-emphassize smaller updates like 8.1, 10.1, 11.1 and 11.2. This is partially due to their short life spans on the market before the next major update arrives.I do expect this to have recently changed as Windows it is moving to rapid release schedule and it'll be increasingly important to adopt these smaller iterations.
kwrzesien - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
Cards on Newegg are showing DirectX 11.2 in the specs list along with OpenGL 4.4. Not that I trust this more than the review - we need to find out more.JDG1980 - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
The efficiency improvements are quite impressive considering that they're still on 28nm. TDP is low enough that AIBs should be able to develop fanless versions of the 750 Ti.The lack of HDMI 2.0 support is disappointing, but understandable, considering that it exists virtually nowhere. (Has the standard even been finalized yet?) But we need to get there eventually. How hard will it be to add this feature to Maxwell in the future? Does it require re-engineering the GPU silicon itself, or just re-designing the PCB with different external components?
Given the increasing popularity of cryptocoin mining, some benchmarks on that might have been useful. I'd be interested to know if Maxwell is any more competitive in the mining arena than Kepler was. Admittedly, no one is going to be using a GPU this small for mining, but if it is competitive on a per-core basis, it could make a big difference going forward.
xenol - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
I'm only slightly annoyed that NVIDIA released this as a 700 series and not an 800 series.DanNeely - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
I suspect that's an indicator that we shouldn't expect the rest of the Maxwell line to launch in the immediate future.