NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Review: The New High End
by Ryan Smith on May 23, 2013 9:00 AM ESTSynthetics
As always we’ll also take a quick look at synthetic performance, though as GTX 780 is just another GK110 card, there shouldn't be any surprises here. These tests are mostly for comparing cards from within a manufacturer, as opposed to directly comparing AMD and NVIDIA cards. We’ll start with 3DMark Vantage’s Pixel Fill test.
Pixel fill is traditionally bound by ROP and memory throughput, but with enough of both the bottleneck can shift back to the shader blocks. In this case that’s exactly what happens, with the GTX 780 trailing GTX Titan by about the theoretical difference between the two cards. On the other hand it’s very odd to see the GTX 680 get so close to the GTX 780 in this test, given the fact that the latter is more powerful in virtually every way possible.
Moving on, we have our 3DMark Vantage texture fillrate test, which does for texels and texture mapping units what the previous test does for ROPs.
Unlike pixel fill, texel fill is right where we expected it to come in compared to cards both above and below the GTX 690.
Finally we’ll take a quick look at tessellation performance with TessMark.
NVIDIA’s tessellation performance is strongly coupled to their SMX count, so the high number of SMXes (12) on the GTX 780 helps it keep well ahead of the pack. In fact we’re a bit surprised it didn’t fall behind GTX Titan by more than what we’re seeing. On the other hand the lead over the GTX 580 is right where we’d expect it to be, showcasing the roughly trebled geometry performance of GTX 780 over GTX 580.
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Stuka87 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Not for the 780 they don't. There are some cards that have Duke Nukem Forever (lol) and some that have Metro: Last Light. But nothing like what AMD offers.chizow - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Metro was not listed when I checked today, EVGA in the past has done their customers right by sending them codes, but not always, depends how tightly Nvidia controls the promotion.jonjonjonj - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
i want free games. wah wah wah. screw free games. i would rather a cheaper more competitively price card then get some game i don't even want.Homeles - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I really like the "Delta Performances" method of comparing the smoothness between each card.hero1 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
This is one awesome card. I really don't think that AMD can compete with Nvidia atm but I would like to see what they have to offer. I want this card but I will be buying the custom cooled ones due to better cooling. Thanks for an awesome review, I have been waiting patiently, not!formulav8 - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
I haven't seen anything even close to dire for AMD that they should all that worried about. Unless I missed something?mayankleoboy1 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
$649 ?Move along, nothing to do here.
EzioAs - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
That was my original plan, but I ended up reading the article. Ahh, curiosity...Spoelie - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
The paragraph on SMXs and GPCs is confusing without the information available from the original Titan piece. One has to remember or infer that Titan already had an SMX disabled, and that in fact GK110 has 15 SMXs built in. This conclusion is also non-obvious because the text before discussed there were no disabled functional units in *most* product tiers.Otherwise the reduction from 14 SMXs to 12 SMXs would imply 2 disabled clusters, not 3.
chaosbloodterfly - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Waiting to see what AMD has for the 8970. Hopefully they don't do what nVidia did for the 680 and release something with barely better performance with almost zero pricing pressure 6 months later.I want something worth liquid cooling damn it!