Why you shouldn't fork out R8500 for a GTX780

[The Joker]

Ok so everyone was waiting for the GTX780 to launch as it was supposed to be an absolute monster card and indeed it turned out to be amazing, slightly slower than a Titan while being a lot less expensive, so here I was thinking to myself..WOW, I am seriously impressed.

So I sat and went through all the reviews and I chatting to a couple of my clients about it when suddenly the local pricing price list popped up in my Inbox. Oh my Gawd I have never laughed so hard in my life

Before mentioning the price, I am posting some benchmarks so you guys can see the performance.

Pretty decent performance right? Yip damn nice!!

Then you come across the pricing, These cards will be starting at R8500...
So to put that into perspective, the cheapest 7970 can be bought for R4200 (Yes I know its not a Ghz edition but you can just push the slider to 1000Mhz yourself and you'll have a Ghz Edition card).

WTF are Nvidia thinking? Really $650 for a gpu that offers 5-14fps performance increase over previous gen cards that still play pretty much everything maxed out apart from Crysis 3.

I am all about hardware and I absolutely love it when faster/better hardware becomes available and I was totally impressed with the GTX780 until that price list popped up.

Why anyone would opt for a single GTX780 over dual 7970's or Dual GTX670 is beyond me.
Although dual gpu's do come with their own set of issues, they do offer insane performance that can actually justify the price.

Maybe I just feel like ranting because this week has been a week of shocks (Local Haswell pricing).

 

[Edelweiss]

PC exclusives < Console exclusives
Pc gaming is being left in the dust and I see it becoming less and less relevant in the future. What an awful waste of money.

 

[The Joker]

PC exclusives < Console exclusives
Pc gaming is being left in the dust and I see it becoming less and less relevant in the future. What an awful waste of money.

I still think pc's are far superior to consoles and I do get the argument that console exclusives are way ahead of pc exclusives, but with the announcement of the new PS4 and Xbox One, I have a feeling that we might just see less console exclusives and more multi platform games being developed on pc and being ported to consoles because of the new architecture.

As far as pricing is concerned I sort of agree, We still don't know what the new consoles will cost.
I have a feeling it'll be well over R5000.

Anyway back on topic

 

[Wesley]

As much as Nvidia holds the performance crown for single-GPU use with the Titan, once you run benchmarks at 2560 x 1440 or 5670 x 1080, the gap actually closes to something more like 21% average between the HD7970 GHz Edition and the GTX Titan. Overclock your HD7970 a little more, and you'd be able to drop that lead to 11% more or less depending on the game. This is why I don't like sites that benchmark high-end GPUs at 1080p - its just not the resolution they're targeted for.

Don't get me wrong, Titan is a thoroughly impressive card. Even though the GTX780 can catch up and pass it, Titan still whallops everything else for double-precision math on a budget and that's why so many people snapped them up as they became available. For the money, the HD7970 is just the better buy. But as far as your game experience goes, Nvidia wins with Physx if its implemented properly.

Also, I find that pricing the GTX780 over R8500 is insane, but its relative to the Titan's price locally that starts at R13,500 or therabouts. In that respect the price is good, but I'd really just go for the HD7970, or the upcoming GTX770.

 

[The Joker]

As much as Nvidia holds the performance crown for single-GPU use with the Titan, once you run benchmarks at 2560 x 1440 or 5670 x 1080, the gap actually closes to something more like 21% average between the HD7970 GHz Edition and the GTX Titan. Overclock your HD7970 a little more, and you'd be able to drop that lead to 11% more or less depending on the game. This is why I don't like sites that benchmark high-end GPUs at 1080p - its just not the resolution they're targeted for.

Don't get me wrong, Titan is a thoroughly impressive card. Even though the GTX780 can catch up and pass it, Titan still whallops everything else for double-precision math on a budget and that's why so many people snapped them up as they became available. For the money, the HD7970 is just the better buy. But as far as your game experience goes, Nvidia wins with Physx if its implemented properly.

Also, I find that pricing the GTX780 over R8500 is insane, but its relative to the Titan's price locally that starts at R13,500 or therabouts. In that respect the price is good, but I'd really just go for the HD7970, or the upcoming GTX770.

I agree but as far as recommending either of them (Titan and GTX780) to my customers, not a chance.
As far as the 770 is concerned, if its anything over R6000 I would also steer clear of it, just by looking at the performance of the GTX780 I can already tell that the 770 will only be slightly faster (10%) than a GTX680 or 7970 Ghz card.

Really disappointed if I'm honest, I expected the 780 to replace the 680, it def isn't a 680 replacement at that price point.

 

[simon]

Actually I would boil it down to one thing as to why I wouldn't spend so much on any gpu.
Because next season something better will release making your shiny new purchase redundant when fighting for performance crown. The value of it also drops so rapidly that any thoughts of selling it to buy the new series each season just to keep a number one e peen is silly unless you have a wad of cash to blow because you sold your Lexus to buy a Mazda.

It is always better imo to go mid to upper mid range, enabling your pc to perform highly and to spend the balance of the money on other things, ie the ever changing motherboard chips

 

[Edelweiss]

Actually I would boil it down to one thing as to why I wouldn't spend so much on any gpu.
Because next season something better will release making your shiny new purchase redundant when fighting for performance crown. The value of it also drops so rapidly that any thoughts of selling it to buy the new series each season just to keep a number one e peen is silly unless you have a wad of cash to blow because you sold your Lexus to buy a Mazda.

It is always better imo to go mid to upper mid range, enabling your pc to perform highly and to spend the balance of the money on other things, ie the ever changing motherboard chips

Or buy the latest console + crapton of peripherals + exclusive games + HDTV
futureproofing yourself for the next say... 10 years?

 

[simon]

Or buy the latest console + crapton of peripherals + exclusive games + HDTV
futureproofing yourself for the next say... 10 years?

Would you buy a PS4, Xbox one etc etc on launch knowing you would pay a premium price? Or would you wait, do the research on which console to go for based on the games available?
At Dion they have a tv for R110 000, I am not going to buy that unless I have a wad of cash to buy it because I know that in a couple years you would be able to pick up a similar spec'd tv for half that price. It is only the eccentric imo that go overboard unless they need it for some other purpose eg work.

 

[Mephisto_Helix]

Yeah there should be a ceiling price for cards. I mean, even if you have the money, it's pretty shocking if you spend R8500 on a graphics card that will be meh the following year or two.

Cannot wrap my head around that price .......

 

[nanonyous]

This is why I don't like sites that benchmark high-end GPUs at 1080p - its just not the resolution they're targeted for.

This. The real reason you shouldn't bother buying a GTX780? Because chances are good that you're still running a 1080p monitor anyway, so getting anything more than mid-range would, in all likelihood, be completely wasted anyway. Want to argue future-proofing? Take into consideration how much power your card is going to be sucking to run games at full tilt unless you actually turn v-sync on and/or implement some frame-rate limits - or assuming a game *is* actually taxing your high-end card, how pointless the settings causing that massive framerate drop might actually be.

I got a GTX460 1gb around the end of 2010, along with an i3-530 and then 4gb of ram. I now have 8gb of ram and can still play most games at pretty high settings at 1080p. Back then, my computer cost me around R8,500 total for the hardware - R2,300 of which was in the graphics card, the rest in mobo/cpu/ram/hdd/psu/speakers.

Over the 3 or so years that I will have used this card, given how much I play games, it will have cost me less than R650 or so in electricity if I played games for 6 hours every single day on average.

A GTX780 sucking 250watts will easily run you over R1,500 in comparison. That R1k more in power consumption alone is money you could put towards a new mid-range card after those 3-4 years. Chances are good that that one new mid-range card will easily outperform - quite heavily at that, the one high-end card you could've bought at the same time as the mid range card. For an active, modern day example of this, look at the the GTX660 Ti vs the GTX580, or GTX490, or GTX295. There's less than a 4 year difference going GTX295 to GTX660Ti, but if someone were to buy a GTX295 when it came out for the R9,000 or so I think that thing cost when it arrived in SA? And run it for four years? They could have fit almost four mid-range card purchases into that span of time. That's a mid-range card a year.


Unless you absolutely have to run the highest settings, 2560x1440 or greater resolutions or play games in stereo while still having high settings and resolution, there's really no point in buying a high-end card at all. Not unless you have money coming out of your anus, in which case you should donate some to me.

 

[jasong]

Yeah that's all true. Power consumption on the high end cards means that in a year or so from that time the mid-range will perform comparably and at half the size. I recently went from a 7850 to a 6850 and then to a 7790 (don't ask what happened there)... the 6850 was enormous and hot compared to the other cards, and performs slower than either of them. I'll always rather go for a mid-range card... unless I suddenly have a fortune to spend on PC stuff in which case I'll get the best of everything. The same money though for me can go towards an SSD, more and faster ram, a better CPU, a top case, PSU, etc etc...