NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 Review: The New Enthusiast Kepler
by Ryan Smith on June 25, 2013 9:00 AM ESTThe Last of the 700 Series & The Test
In something of an unusual move, along with announcing the GTX 760, NVIDIA also laid out their desktop video card plans for the next several months, leading through the fall. Typically NVIDIA doesn’t announce the non-existence of something, but then again since they apparently have nothing left to hide, there’s little reason not to.
In any case, the GeForce GTX 760 will be the last desktop 700 series card for the next several months. NVIDIA will not be introducing any further desktop cards according to the schedule they’ve provided us, so their lineup will be stable from here on. The 700 series allowed NVIDIA to introduce GK110 based cards and refresh their GK104 based cards, while GK107 and GK106 based products will not be changing. This means that rather than introducing a GTX 750 for example for GK106, NVIDIA will simply keep the top GK106 as the GTX 660.
This move is admittedly a bit weird for how NVIDIA normally does things, as with Fermi they updated their lineups top-to-bottom. Whether this means NVIDIA is planning a late update based on new chips – ala the GeForce GT 200 series, NVIDIA’s 40nm pipe cleaner – or if they simply don’t see a need to roll out new product numbers remains to be seen. But since NVIDIA has added GK106 parts as recently as March, and their top GK106 part doesn’t leave them much room for growth, there’s also a lack of technical opportunity to refresh the rest of their lineup like there was for their GK104 parts. Then again, AMD hasn’t bumped up the series number of their competing retail parts, so there’s little incentive (for once) to play number games in retail.
In any case the current lineup is most likely what we’ll be looking at through the rest of the year, until Maxwell sometime in 2014. This will leave the GTX 760 as NVIDIA’s top 1080p card, while the GK106 based GTX 660 will remain as NVIDIA’s more budget oriented 1080p card.
The Test
The press drivers for the GTX 760 are 320.39, a further bug fix of the existing R319 series drivers that also add support for the GTX 760. On the AMD side we’re using a mix of Catalyst 13.5 (7970) and Catalyst 13.6 (7950, 7870).
For comparison purposes we’ve also dug up a few older cards. Naming aside, NVIDIA’s GTX 560 Ti was their last $250 card and the class of card most 2 year cycle buyers will be coming from. Meanwhile we’re also including AMD’s Radeon HD 6870 and NVIDIA’s GTX 460 1GB. Finally, we’re going to include both the Radeon HD 7950 and 7950 Boost in our charts. The Boost edition has largely supplanted the original in retail, but frustratingly there are still some non-Boost (or otherwise sub-850MHz) cards on the market, so this covers both scenarios.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | EVGA X79 SLI |
| Power Supply: | Antec True Power Quattro 1200 |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung 470 (256GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1867 4 x 4GB (8-10-9-26) |
| Case: | Thermaltake Spedo Advance |
| Monitor: | Samsung 305T |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 7970 AMD Radeon HD 7950 Boost AMD Radeon HD 7950 AMD Radeon HD 7870 AMD Radeon HD 6870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 NVIIDA GeForce GTX 560 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 320.18 NVIDIA ForceWare 320.39 AMD Catalyst 13.5 Beta 2 AMD Catalyst 13.6 Beta 2 |
| OS: | Windows 8 Pro |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
110 Comments
View All Comments
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Going by my chart, I have the GTX 760 winning in 7 of 10 games (all but DiRT, Hitman, and Crysis 1) at our highest 1080p quality settings, which is where I'm focusing on for a card this expensive. Of those magnitude matters; most of those GTX 760 wins are in the double digits, so the average does indeed end up being 8%As for frametimes, the idea is that we would normally include them. That said this review left us crunched for time; I would have likely needed to drop the Fermi cards to make time. With that in mind, there's absolutely nothing interesting going on with single-GPU frametimes right now with the games we use. The only place NVIDIA still differ are under multi-GPU scenarios.
Zstream - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Shouldn't we be using the median instead of average?ewood - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
median, mean and mode all show very different things. you should have all three to draw detailed conclusions, however if only one is available i would personally prefer it be the mean.ShieTar - Thursday, June 27, 2013 - link
With a sample size of 10, the median would not be a very helpful information. To be honest, the mean is not all the important either. The distribution of performances is not all that random when comparing nVidia and AMD, but rather there are significant preferences for one architecture by each game.So everybody on the lookout for a new card should mainly be checking for a benchmark specifically on the game he/she spends the most time with. For this reason, I would love to see the benchmarks on Anandtech include the name of the engine for each game (if it is a licensed one), and maybe provide some handy reference to figure out what other games use the same reference.
And personally, as a player who does not play reaction-based games like shooters or racers a lot, I would love AT to re-introduce a BioWare and/or Blizzard title back into their benchmark-zoo. Even if those are not extremely new or demanding, I think they still have a high importance for a large number of players who don't care much to shoot virtual people in their virtual faces.
MarcVenice - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I see, I counted Sleeping Dogs as a win for the HD 7950 as well, considering the minimum fps is a bit higher. Thanks for the reply, I agree that if all is well with frametimes in a certain game, fraps is still a good way to measure raw rendering power.JeBarr - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Most multi-GPU users are reporting that the frame time issue mostly exists for 2-way SLI and Quad SLI. It seems that 3-way SLI or Dual GPU single slot SLI is the way to go for gamers concerned about the stutters. I'm not sure about 4-way SLI though, since I don't bother with it anymore. I can however, confirm that in my personal experience a single GPU or 3-way SLI is mostly unaffected.draknon - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
This seems like a good spot to upgrade from my 460gtxEzioAs - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Yeah, it is. My original plan was to get the GTX 760, but Nvidia delayed it and I wasn't going to wait anymore, so I went and bought the GTX 660.DanNeely - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I'm tempted to upgrade to it from my 560 when I built a Haswell box later this summer and put the difference between it and a higher end card toward a better SSD, etc and then get a top end Maxwell based card next year.I'm a bit concerned about ending up in the same trap I did last time though. I bought the 560 as a stopgap replacement in Jan 2012 after stupidity killed my 5870, with the intent of upgrading to a GK100 based card in half a year or so only to have nVidia fumble its top end launch.
omarccx - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
It seems like an even greater upgrade from my HD4000. :x