Last week saw the release of the Geforce GTX780, Nvidia’s baby version of the Titan, which now retails for $649 and bests AMD’s Radeon HD7970 GHz Edition and is much faster than Nvidia’s own GTX680. The company needs a GTX680 successor, however, and that’s the job of the upcoming GTX770.
Reviews of the card have gone up today (30 May 2013) and the leaks from previous websites have been spot on. The GTX770 is a tweaked and improved GTX680, but it adds in some special sauce to the mix. Namely, the card is allowed a much higher overclocking profile thanks to voltage and power tweaks for GPU Boost 2.0 and overclocks in much the same way as the GTX780 and the GTX Titan – clock speeds are tied to voltages and you maximise speeds by raising the maximum voltage of the card.
In addition, the GTX770 is the world’s first graphics card to ship with GDDR5 RAM running at 1750MHz or 7.0GHz. Nvidia’s GTX680 was capable of this, but the memory controllers needed extra work and the card required extra voltage, something that Nvidia couldn’t allow while they worked on fixing SLI scaling issues and adding in frame metering hardware.
| Graphics card |
Core Clock (Mhz) | Boost Clock (Mhz) | Shader core count | Memory bus width | Memory speed | Peak Power | Current Price (US $) |
| Geforce GTX680 | 1006 | 1058 | 1536 | 256-bit | 6.0 GHz | 200W | $460 |
| Geforce GTX770 | 1046 | 1085 | 1536 | 256-bit | 7.0 GHz | 230W | $400 |
| Geforce GTX780 | 863 | 900 | 2304 | 384-bit | 6.0 GHz | 250W | $650 |
| Geforce GTX Titan | 836 | 876 | 2688 | 384-bit | 6.0 GHz | 250W | $1000 |
| Radeon HD7970 GHz Edition | 1000 | 1050 | 2048 | 384-bit | 6.0 GHz | 250W | $450 |
IVideoCardz.com compiled a shortlist of results from their benchmarks and the results are…interesting. While the GTX770 pulls ahead of the GTX680 and the HD7970 GHz Edition, it only does so at a large margin for most games at 1080p. Once the resolution is bumped up to 2560 x 1600, the gap shortens considerably and the HD7970 GHz Edition draws up pretty close.
The gap is incredibly short in Borderlands 2, Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, Crysis 3 and Max Payne. Because the HD7970 GHz Edition has a 3GB frame buffer and a larger 384-bit bus, its target resolution is either a 30-inch screen or an Eyefinity setup, territory in which the GTX770 would suffer. Overall game performance is good, but its still really weird how close the Radeon is compared to these new cards. I hazard a guess that a 10% overclock on the Radeon would result in around a 5-10% performance increase in most games – enough, I suspect, to match the GTX770 in most benchmarks.
However, the GTX770 is going to be very interesting when it comes to overclocking. The memory speed is stratospherically high and 7.0 GHz is nothing to sneeze at. Some reviewers were able to run up to 8.0GHz with little trouble. In addition to raising the PowerTune level, GPU Boost allowed the GTX770 to fall within 5% of the GTX780’s performance. That is remarkable.
Overall, this is just a refresh of Kepler graphics cards and the GTX770 is a GTX680 with some extra special sauce and hot chips on the side. Memory configurations will be set at either 2GB or 4GB GDDR5 RAM at 7.0GHz and if the price is right – estimated to be $400 – it will definitely eat into the market for GTX680 buyers. The performance is phenomenal and the ball is now in AMD’s court – either it drops prices again to match the GTX770, or or adds in more games to the Never Settle bundle to add more value.
Reviews: Anandtech, PC Perspective, Tom’s Hardware, TechpowerUp!, Hexus
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Slightly better performance than a GTX680 for $100RRP less. Last gen 670 pricing at last gen 680 performance is not bad. I think this may be my card, maybe even SLI. Maybe.
Since this seems to be a rebrand of the 680 I wonder if Nvidia atleast has changed it enough so that it can overclock more than the 680 could. The 30W of TDP seems promising unless that extra GHz of memory speed is causing that.