Nvidia GeForce GTX range – SA price, performance comparison

With the recent launch of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970, we thought we would take a look at how the new cards compare – price wise – to the existing GTX range.

The 980, according to Nvidia, is the fastest single-chip graphics card on the market and features Nvidia’s new Maxwell architecture. Both new cards also offer Dynamic Super Resolution – which claims to deliver 4K-quality gaming on 1080p displays – and VXGI (Voxel Global Illumination).

For the comparison all card specifications were taken off Nvidia’s hardware product page. We decided to start at the GTX 770 and move up, for no other reason than adding in any card below that would make our article unsexy (have you seen the 600 series cards?).

In terms of the cards’ pricing, we checked out several local retailers and have provided an average price.

Nvidia GeForce GTX Series
Card	Standard VRAM	Memory Clock	CUDA Cores	Core Clock	Bus Width	Power Consumption	Price
Nvidia GeForce GTX 770	2GB	7GHz GDDR5	1536	1046MHz	256-bit	230W	R4,500
Nvidia GeForce GTX 780	3GB	6GHz GDDR5	2304	863MHz	384-bit	250W	R8,200
Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti	3GB	7GHz GDDR5	2880	875MHz	384-bit	250W	R9,200
Nvidia GeForce GTX 970	4GB	7GHz GDDR5	1664	1050MHz	256-bit	145W	R5,800
Nvidia GeForce GTX 980	4GB	7GHz GDDR5	2048	1126MHz	256-bit	165W	R9,700
Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan Black	6GB	7GHz GDDR5	2880	889MHz	384-bit	250W	R15,500
Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan Z	12GB	7GHz GDDR5	5760	705MHz	768-bit	375W	R47,000

There you have it: while the GTX 970 and GTX 980 are not exactly cheap, they are more affordable than the Titan range and compare favourably against the GTX 780 and GTX 780 Ti.

Want to see what a R47,000 graphics card looks like? Here you go.

Nvidia GTX Titan Z

While price is one of the indicators as to how much power you can expect from your graphics card, performance benchmarking is the best was to rank a GPUs. In short: how many frames can it chuck out at high resolution.

Anandtech – hardware experts and testing savants – put all new cards through their paces soon after launch, testing them across several games at various resolutions and graphics settings.

We found a common test among the cards – the graphically demanding Crysis 3 – and tabulated Anandtech’s results, below. Where Anandtech had no tests for a card, we referred to Nvidia’s product page or other online reviews. (Nvidia’s and other sites’ testing rigs may differ from Anandtech’s.)

Nvidia GeForce GTX Series
Card	Anandtech Reviews: Crysis 3 – 2560×1440 – High Quality – FXAA (frames per second)
Nvidia GeForce GTX 770	46.9
Nvidia GeForce GTX 780	51.2
Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti	62.4
Nvidia GeForce GTX 970	54.2
Nvidia GeForce GTX 980	60.7
Nvidia’s GeForce Product Page: Crysis 3 – 2560×1600 – Maximum Settings (frames per second)
Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan Black	32
Guru3D Review: Crysis 3 – 2560×1440 – Very High Quality – FXAA (frames per second)
Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan Z	71