NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 Review: The New Enthusiast Kepler
by Ryan Smith on June 25, 2013 9:00 AM ESTFar Cry 3
The next game in our benchmark suite is Far Cry 3, Ubisoft’s island-jungle action game. A lot like our other jungle game Crysis, Far Cry 3 can be quite tough on GPUs, especially with MSAA and improved alpha-to-coverage checking thrown into the mix. On the other hand it’s still a bit of a pig on the CPU side, and seemingly inexplicably we’ve found that it doesn’t play well with HyperThreading on our testbed, making this the only game we’ve ever had to disable HT for to maximize our framerates.
With Far Cry 3 we’re back to a game where the GTX 760 has a clear lead, surpassing the 7950B by an unexpected 28% at our highest 1080p settings. However 41.5fps is less than idea for an action game like Far Cry 3, so we have to drop the MSAA to take a crack at 60fps. Even then, the GTX 760 leads by 14%.
This also happens to be another great example of the ROP difference between GTX 760 and GTX 660 Ti. With MSAA enabled the GTX 760 takes a clear lead, but without MSAA the two cards are practically tied.
Meanwhile Far Cry 3 is also another strong example of the performance gap between the GTX 760 and cards 2-3 years old. GTX 760 leaves those older cards in the dust by anywhere between 77% for the GTX 560 Ti and 6870, up to 138% for the GTX 460 1GB. CPU performance may have plateaued over the last half-decade, but thanks to the embarrassingly parallel nature of graphics, we continue to see massive gains over a whole generation.
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karasaj - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Your thoughts seem to be a bit... Lacking :) thanks for the review!Ryan Smith - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Did the CMS eat the final page again? Everything looks fine on my end.karasaj - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
The final page was missing when I first looked, after about 5 minutes it seemed cleared up :)ilkhan - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to driver games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2013.I think you meant "drive" not "driver"
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Indeed. Thank you. Fixed.Guspaz - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
tl;dr: It's a GeForce GTX 670 for $100 less.That's not a dig on the article, it's well written, but that does seem to be what I'm reading from all the test results.
Atlas T. - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Very informative review. The GTX 760 is undoubtedly a potential buy.I wonder if my i5-2310 2.9GHz (locked CPU) would manage to handle this little beast fully overclocked?
omarccx - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
It should do fine.UltraTech79 - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
Even a shit i5 will be fine.Wreckage - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
AMD will now have to sell the 7970 for $200 and bundle 12 games with it.