Nvidia GeForce GTX 760 Review Roundup

An anonymous reader writes "Earlier today, Nvidia released its latest graphics card: the Geforce GTX 760. A followup to last month's GTX 770 launch, the new GTX 760 is the fourth 700-series card since the company launched the GTX Titan back in February. Sporting 1,152 CUDA cores, 96 TMUs, 32 ROPS, a 256-bit memory interface that effectively runs at 6 GHz, a base clock of 980 MHz, and a Boost speed of up to 1,033 MHz, the newly-minted GTX 760 is offered at a price point of $250. Benchmark results are available from all the usual suspects: AnandTech, HotHardware, PC Magazine, PCPer, and Tom's Hardware. To make a long story short, Nvidia's new card edges out AMD's equally-priced Radeon HD 7950 Boost Edition, and even goes toe-to-toe with the $300 Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition. Factoring out AMD's incredible Never Settle game bundles, and looking purely at performance, the GTX 670 allows Nvidia to cinch up the mainstream gaming price point." Reader crookedvulture adds, "The $250 card is an updated spin on an existing GPU, so it doesn't raise the bar dramatically. In fact, the GTX 760 achieves rough performance parity with the Radeon HD 7950 Boost, which costs just a little bit more. The situation is similar at around $400, where the contest between the GeForce GTX 770 and Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition is a toss-up overall. These price/performance scatter plots paint the picture clearly. AMD has largely resolved its previous frame latency issues with new drivers, making the battle between GeForce and Radeon more about extras than performance. Nvidia offers software to optimize game settings and record gameplay sessions, while AMD includes download codes for recent games. You really can't go wrong either way."

Comments

tl;dr:

[Guspaz]

It's the GeForce GTX 670 for a hundred bucks cheaper. That's what all the reviews boil down to.

Re:tl;dr:

[amiga3D]

I can't even look at AMD cards. Thanks to their drivers it's Nvidia only for me and my linux tower. Since Nvidia came out with their linux drivers years ago it's been one Nvidia card after another in every machine. AMD doesn't care of course since Linux is such a tiny slice of the customer pie which means when I build a windows box for friends I slap an Nvidia card in there too out of sheer resentment.

Re:tl;dr:

[Hadlock]

Now that AMD powers all three consoles, it's likely that windows and BSD drivers will improve. Recompiling a BSD ps4 game for the Linux stream console probably will be less difficult than it has been in the past.

I'll still be buying NVidia this round as well.

Re:tl;dr:

[Guspaz]

AMD powered two of the three consoles this past generation (Wii and 360), the drivers are still terrible (getting Enduro drivers working on Windows is a nightmare). Why would adding one more console change anything?

Bloat

[causality]

Nvidia offers software to optimize game settings and record gameplay sessions

Did anyone else read that and think, "this does not belong in a device driver"?

Maybe it's a great idea that many people will use and there is no other possible way to accomplish this task in userspace. I'm open to that idea, but right now I just don't see the merit.

Re:Bloat

[Nemyst]

It's good because it uses the GPU's internal H.264 encoding hardware to record seamlessly at no cost to framerate. Fraps and other screen recorders are known to often halve frame rates or more. By doing the recording on the GPU itself, you can extract the framebuffer much more efficiently, transcode it straight in the GPU without much (if any) involvement by the CPU, and save the much smaller file to the hard disk at the very end, thus avoiding the use of the comparatively slow disk to store the very large non-compressed buffers.

Prior to that, the only way of recording the screen efficiently was to use HDMI recorders which would just take the entire output and transcode that externally, which is far less practical and much more expensive.