NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Video Card Review @ [H]

Rizen said:
As an owner of 680 SLI I'm going to sit out this round. But pretty impressive on the overclocks. Definitely beat my expectations there. Still would have preferred to see them stick to the $500-550 price point, but I can understand why they are not. These will sell out instantly.
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Yeah, only a single 680 here but I think if I were going to upgrade I'd just pick up another 680 at this price/performance level. $650 is a little high, regardless of how much the Titan costs and its relative performance. They still jacked up the base price of the GTX x80 to $650 from $500 last time.
 
One thing I've noticed from checking several reviews is that the Titan increases its lead as resolution goes up, sometimes beating the 780 by 20% at surround resolutions. Also, I would be very hesitant to buy a card with 3GB for a surround setup with monitors on the large side.

These 780s look killer for 2560 gamers or people running small surround resolutions but I'm not sure why anyone would wait for a 6GB 780 and pay like $750 for it over getting used Titans if their resolution needs are bigger.
 
anonmoniker said:
These 780s look killer for 2560 gamers or people running small surround resolutions but I'm not sure why anyone would wait for a 6GB 780 and pay like $750 for it over getting used Titans if their resolution needs are bigger.
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Because you can likely get Titan-like performance by overclocking and save yourself $150-200?
 
shad0w4life said:
How does this get a gold award for being more expensive that previous generations that had huge gains in performance. If they phased out the 680 and offered it at the same price it would definitely be worthy.
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From my time here at [H], they tout experience over price.
They tend to recommend the cards or parts that will give the user the best real world experience.
 
$650 is still just too much for a GPU IMO. I barely justified spending $400 on a 7950 after getting a huge bonus at work. Its a GREAT card, but why do GPU prices keep going up and up at this point?
 
Flyinfinni said:
$650 is still just too much for a GPU IMO. I barely justified spending $400 on a 7950 after getting a huge bonus at work. Its a GREAT card, but why do GPU prices keep going up and up at this point?
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1) Costs to produce
2) Smaller market
3) Inflation
 
Flyinfinni said:
AMD is still very competitive at this point, so I wouldn't claim that.
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The 770 and 760 Ti are coming soon, which will further push the price of AMD cards down.
The 7970 started at $550, now $399, and soon to be $299-349. Meanwhile Nv will have the $400+ tier to themselves, charging whatever they like.

AMD will sell more cards at lower price points, but where each company touts having the fastest card, AMD is months behind the curve for the first time in a while.
The trickle down effect for pricing is important in this particular industry. A 8970 released before the 780, could have saved us $100 off Nv's pricing.
 
anonmoniker said:
The cards look similarly overclockable, with both topping out in the 1150-1200 range.
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In fairness, its likely the 780 is going to be slightly more overclockable since it should run slightly cooler and have less shaders to overclock. Clock speed goes a long ways to make up for less shaders so this is why a slightly overclocked 780 matches Titan performance most of the time.
 
jonathonball said:
I bought an eVGA... I'm very seriously considering using their step-up program. Should be able to get into a 780 for a comparatively small sum. I'll lie to myself and treat it as a separate purchase and just pretend I didn't just plunk down a fat wad of cash.
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Step Up is worth it. You give them your receipt. They deduct the price you paid for the card.. you pay the difference between the two and the pay to ship your card to them, they ship the card your stepping up to to you for free.

The catch is, you can only get the standard ones, they don't do Step-Up for OC cards.

So if you buy a SSC 680 GTX for example, they'll only allow you to step up to the "Reference" 780 GTX.

All in all, beastly card. I'm waiting personally now to see the 760 GTX Ti's
 
David_Schroth said:
I could go dredge up other posts where Kyle and Brent have responded to this, but in short, the "Maximum Playable Settings" charts that you see reflect the best playable performance for a given card. This takes into account frame time delivery, smoothness, runt frames and whatever else you want to point at, but is expressed as a subjective opinion. Since we actually play the games rather than running a script or canned benchmark, we use our intuition as gamers to know what is a good experience and what is not. We have been doing things like that around here for a VERY long time.... many years before the whole frame time revolution started. When we are determining these settings, we don't watch the FPS counter even though we are recording it - that data is captured and presented to back up our subjective opinion, but it is NOT what we rely upon.

That being said, at some point, I wouldn't be surprised if we had an FCAT article appear, but knowing about that is a bit above my paygrade around here (i.e. I'm only speculating).
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The thing is though, that your 'max playable' setting is not rooted in any hard facts. No numbers (I'll explain).

Max playable for YOU might not be max playable for ME. After all, we have lots of people saying you don't need more then 30FPS to have smooth gameplay. How many people here agree? Some would say they need 45FPS minimum. Others would say 60FPS minimum (if we had Frame Time ratings earlier it'd probably be in MS rather then FPS but I think I've made my point)

So to conclude.. I need numbers.. I need to know frame time. What you think is max playable is not what I and others would consider max playable. Some would, for sure, but I don't know if you're like me or not. I need those numbers.
 
Bojamijams said:
Places like Anandtech, PCPer, TechCrunch and Hardware Canucks all realize that FPS measurements are misleading for showing the true performance of a system.. especially since FPS takes into effect runt frames which give the FPS rating a fake boost.

Frame Time is what those sites have shifted to and only include FPS ratings for people who don't know that Frame Time is the new standard and need to be eased into it, or simply as a secondary metric.

I'm very dissapointed to find you did nothing with Frame Time.
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A lot of people don't understand frametime and how it works. FRAPS does not properly record frametime. It does it too early in the pipeline, it doesn't actually capture what the display sees in regards to frametime. There simply is no easy or quick way to show true frametime in every single review, and even if there was, our natural real-world gaming of finding what is playable takes into account all aspects of gameplay already.
 
Inmo guys we should consider also that lately games are horrible optimized, we are all overpowered for games, just a lit % of them are good optimized rest not, so this marketing of producing things a bit better than we have makes u spend more and more money

i see games using 45% of each of my cards with all maxed out at 1080p, when they should use more %
 
shad0w4life said:
How does this get a gold award for being more expensive that previous generations that had huge gains in performance. If they phased out the 680 and offered it at the same price it would definitely be worthy.

HC did more games with Fcat and there were a few games where it was very "meh" as well.


@sushiwarrior FacrCry 3 single card has frame latency issues still, HC pointed that out in their graph showing frame latency.
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I can't guarantee it but I bet you what you see in the graph is a result of errors in FCAT rather than problems in the game. I've seen similar peaks and it usually has to do with either colour issues in the rendered bars or frame cache clearing issues.
 
Flyinfinni said:
$650 is still just too much for a GPU IMO. I barely justified spending $400 on a 7950 after getting a huge bonus at work. Its a GREAT card, but why do GPU prices keep going up and up at this point?
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680s and 7970 GHz's are still ~$450 and the 780 puts a pretty stiff beating on both, so clearly they don't want to be too close to them in pricing. With it looking like the 770 is going to be to the 680 something like what the 7970 GHz is to the vanilla 7970, I'd expect the 770 to launch right around that $450 mark with the 680s being dropped to around $400.

You've also got the Titan at ~$1000, so $650 is a bargain in comparison. AMD doesn't have anything that can touch the 780, so that gives NVIDIA a good bit of leeway in pricing.

klingonscum said:
I think I'll wait for the ~$250 760Ti to come out in a couple/three months. :D
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With the 770 basically being a tweaked 680, I kind of wonder if we'll see a full 7XX series lineup (I'd imagine a 760Ti would just be a 670).
 
Bojamijams said:
The thing is though, that your 'max playable' setting is not rooted in any hard facts. No numbers (I'll explain).

Max playable for YOU might not be max playable for ME. After all, we have lots of people saying you don't need more then 30FPS to have smooth gameplay. How many people here agree? Some would say they need 45FPS minimum. Others would say 60FPS minimum (if we had Frame Time ratings earlier it'd probably be in MS rather then FPS but I think I've made my point)

So to conclude.. I need numbers.. I need to know frame time. What you think is max playable is not what I and others would consider max playable. Some would, for sure, but I don't know if you're like me or not. I need those numbers.
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Thank you for your feedback. We are going to continue to continue to focus on real-world gameplay and focus on the actual experience delivered by each video card compared and relate that experience to you. We aren't scientists, we are gamers, and we use these video cards to game. Consistency is part of our testing already, along with a myriad of other factors to determine the highest playable settings.
 
Blkout said:
In fairness, its likely the 780 is going to be slightly more overclockable since it should run slightly cooler and have less shaders to overclock. Clock speed goes a long ways to make up for less shaders so this is why a slightly overclocked 780 matches Titan performance most of the time.
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I would expect the 780 to hit the higher end of that range a bit more often since it is clocked higher to begin with. It appears both overclock by roughly the same percentage over the standard clocks though, so they would get the same percentage gain.

Not seeing how overclocking changes their relative performance (unless your assertion about shaders/cooling is true). However, my experience has been that heat isn't really a problem with the Titans...even with overclocked Tri Sli titans heat hasn't been a problem for me...they stay around 80.
 
Nice review. A lot of hard work there. I would have like to have seen triple-screen benchmarks (which might better show differences between the 780 and the Titan) but I guess there wasn't time. I'm sure [H] will get to it in due course.

ETA: How does overclocking affect the power draw?
 
Current Specs : 3770k & GTX 690

I'm currently on the mini-ITX platform and hoping to upgrade to mATX SLI config.

What will be the best upgrade path ? Another 690 or something else?
 
So, from your apples-to-apples data, on average the 780 is 5 FPS faster than a 7970 for an additional $250 over what you can buy a 7970 non-ghz edition for.

What I'd love to know is how that value proposition changes when you overclock both of those cards to the max!
 
Thanks for the review. Appreciate the efforts.

I think it's awesome that we are getting these new cards. Thank you Nvidia. But, the pricing and performance still do not add up to me.

If I was in the market for the best performance for my PC, I would really have to consider buying 2 used 7970's which would give me 6GB of frame buffer and higher performance over this new card and it's big brother, Titan. Also, with the new video drivers coming out soonish that addresses runt frames, you really have to take all into consideration.

Shiny and new or tried and true.
 
I don't see it from a person who is perfectly happy playing games at 1920x1080. Just don't need it and would never spend that kind of money for either this card, the Titan or SLI of any kind. I can't wrap my head around it. Nvidia is making too damn much money already and could produce better and cheaper. It's all about the buck and I'm not giving them anymore than I have to. For those playing the res I do there are a lot of options and the 580 is still one of them. I'm glad I'm where I'm at and don't envy the big boys with their triple monitors at all. I'm a cool dude at 1080p.
 
This release was alot faster than i had hoped getting my 670 last year. But i'm happy to see a gk110 getting its "real" release and being in the sub 1k market. now time to wait for the 770 results and crossing my fingers its still gk110. If its a rebranded 680 then it'll be a helluva decision to either sell the 670 and get a 780 or pick up a second 670 and SLI that if those prices drop.
 
SixFootDuo said:
Thanks for the review. Appreciate the efforts.

I think it's awesome that we are getting these new cards. Thank you Nvidia. But, the pricing and performance still do not add up to me.

If I was in the market for the best performance for my PC, I would really have to consider buying 2 used 7970's which would give me 6GB of frame buffer and higher performance over this new card and it's big brother, Titan. Also, with the new video drivers coming out soonish that addresses runt frames, you really have to take all into consideration.

Shiny and new or tried and true.
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You still get 3gb framebuffer with 2 cards.
 
Mike89 said:
I don't see it from a person who is perfectly happy playing games at 1920x1080. Just don't need it and would never spend that kind of money for either this card, the Titan or SLI of any kind. I can't wrap my head around it. Nvidia is making too damn much money already and could produce better and cheaper. It's all about the buck and I'm not giving them anymore than I have to. For those playing the res I do there are a lot of options and the 580 is still one of them. I'm glad I'm where I'm at and don't envy the big boys with their triple monitors at all. I'm a cool dude at 1080p.
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My thoughts exactly! These prices are INSANE! I can't believe people are paying this and yes I can afford it, but I can't justify it. Granted I game at 1080P, but I'm perfectly happy with what I have. I can't believe the new price levels that Nvidia and AMD are pushing with the high end single gpu. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the 4870 released at like $300? The 7970 was like close to $500 or something and I bet the new AMD 8970(?) will be like $599+ now. I won't even go into Nvidia's pricing because it's even higher. Pure Insanity!
 
Mike89 said:
I don't see it from a person who is perfectly happy playing games at 1920x1080. Just don't need it and would never spend that kind of money for either this card, the Titan or SLI of any kind. I can't wrap my head around it. Nvidia is making too damn much money already and could produce better and cheaper. It's all about the buck and I'm not giving them anymore than I have to. For those playing the res I do there are a lot of options and the 580 is still one of them. I'm glad I'm where I'm at and don't envy the big boys with their triple monitors at all. I'm a cool dude at 1080p.
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I run 1920x1080 and my 680gtx is not enough for me. To each their own.
 
Brent_Justice said:
and yes, 780 SLI testing will be coming... after something else
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Surround?
xero404 said:
This release was alot faster than i had hoped getting my 670 last year. But i'm happy to see a gk110 getting its "real" release and being in the sub 1k market. now time to wait for the 770 results and crossing my fingers its still gk110. If its a rebranded 680 then it'll be a helluva decision to either sell the 670 and get a 780 or pick up a second 670 and SLI that if those prices drop.
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Since you already have a 670, IMO it's GTX 780 or stay with what you have.
The 770 is just a faster GK104.
 
Hmmm. I don't know if I wish to get one or not. The features and price put it right in the maybe area. I can afford it, and I'd like more power but I don't care for dual GPUs. I just dunno if I want to spend the money, or if I want a card with 3GB of VRAM. Plenty for now, maybe not for when games for the new consoles launch.

Decisions, decisions :D.
 
The GTX 780 is on NewEgg for $630~, guess it seems I was right *eyeroll*

The 780 was NOT a step up from the 680, the 770 is the step up :D
 
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