Nvidia Geforce GTX780 Ti review roundup

Nvidia last week revealed the Geforce GTX780 Ti and the reviews are up.

The GTX780 Ti is the successor to the GTX 780 and is also technically the successor to the GTX Titan, even though the latter serves a very different purpose in the market thanks to its unlocked double-precision shaders.

The GTX780 Ti launched at a recommended retail price in the US of $699, making it $150 more than the competing AMD Radeon R9 290X. That translates roughly to R7,200, but it remains to be seen if local suppliers and distributors will be able to approach the same cost in South Africa.

The GTX780 Ti is the full implementation of Nvidia’s Kepler architecture. It opens up the floodgates for all 2880 CUDA cores, but leaves the double-precision hardware disabled, giving the Titan some breathing room despite it’s high price.

Specification	Geforce GTX780 Ti	AMD Radeon R9 290X	Geforce GTX Titan	Geforce GTX780
Shader Cores	2880	2816	2688	2304
Raster Operators	48	64	48	48
Texture units	240	176	224	192
Peak compute	5.0GFLOPS	5.6GFLOPS	4.5GFLOPS	3.98GFLOPS
Clock speed	875MHz	800MHz	837MHz	863MHz
Boost speed	928MHz	1000MHz	876MHz	900MHz
Memory speed	1750MHz	1250MHz	1502MHz	1502MHz
VRAM buffer	3GB	4GB	6GB	3GB
Bus width	384-bit	512-bit	384-bit	384-bit
Memory bandwidth	336GB/s	320GB/s	288GB/s	288GB/s
TDP	300W	300W	250W	220W
Launch price	$699	$549	$999	$649

The GTX780 matches its smaller sibling with the same number of Raster Operators but has a slight boost in texture units, helping it shift more of its weight around at higher resolutions. Clock speeds are also up by a small amount but this is because there are more functional units on the chip itself, increasing power usage and heat generation.

The memory is the biggest surprise, shipping with the same GDDR5 7.0GHz memory found in the GTX770. Nvidia has had a lot of time to work with and tweak their designs for these chips and most cards will overclock to an incredible 8.0GHz on air cooling alone.

In terms of compute performance, the GTX780 Ti is below the theoretical peak of the Radeon R9 290X and only a little higher than the GTX Titan. The card should dominate up to 4K resolutions and should see less of a performance hit than the R9 290X once you use games with larger and more complex textures at higher resolutions.

How it performs

In games that are shader-bound (Guild Wars 2), the GTX780 Ti shows a minimal lead over the R9 290X, but in games that use high-resolution textures (Crysis 3) the lead extends quite a bit, in some cases by as much as 10fps at UltraHD 4K resolution.

Neither the GTX780 Ti or its rival R9 290X are able to consistently provide single-GPU gaming with playable framerates at the 4K resolution, however. Skyrim, Battlefield 3 and Bioshock Infinite are all playable but are also older games based on outdated engines.

Gaming on a 1080p monitor at 120-144Hz with Lightboost enabled is possible with a single GTX780 Ti. PC Perspective’s tests at 1080p demonstrate this, with some games possibly requiring an overclock to maintain the 120Hz minimum.

What the reviews say

PC Perspective gave it their Gold Award and noted that it was the fastest single Nvidia GPU they’d ever tested out of the box. They did mention, however, that the high price may turn more buyers to the bargain Radeon R9 290 instead.

Anandtech gave the GTX780 Ti a positive review and praised the stock cooler for its effectiveness compared to AMD’s top-end cards. Overclocking results were similarly incredible, showing the GTX780 Ti perform on par or better than the Radeon HD7990.

TechpowerUp gave it their Editor’s Choice award and mentioned how the Geforce games bundle and the Shield voucher made the card more compelling than the R9 290X. Again, it’s mentioned that buying and overclocking the R9 290 would be a good deal yielding similar performance.

The Tech Report gave it a thumbs-up and called it “the finest single-GPU graphics card in the market.” While their testing showed a closer finish between the GTX780 Ti and the R9 290X, this was with the latter card in Uber performance mode.

Hexus gave it their Recommended award but made the 3GB frame-buffer their sticking point, as this may not be future-proof enough for games with larger textures and bigger environments.

Tweaktown gave the card their “Must Have” award and wrote that even in the face of Mantle and AMD’s True Audio, the GTX780 Ti would surely continue to hold its own as the single-GPU king in the majority of games.