Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti Review: GK110, Fully Unlocked

An anonymous reader writes "Nvidia lifted the veil on its latest high-end graphics board, the GeForce GTX 780 Ti. With a total of 2,880 CUDA cores and 240 texture units, the GK110 GPU inside the GTX 780 Ti is fully unlocked. This means that the new card has an additional SMX block, 192 more shader cores, and 16 additional texture units than the $1,000 GTX Titan launched back in February! Offered at just $700, the GTX 780 Ti promises to improve gaming performance over the Titan, yet the card has been artificially limited in GPGPU performance — no doubt in order to make sure the pricier card remains relevant to those unable or unwilling to spring for a Quadro. The benchmark results simply illustrate the GTX 780 Ti's on-paper specs. The card was able to beat AMD's just-released flagship, the Radeon R9 290x by single-digit percentages, up to double-digits topping 30% — depending on the variability of AMD's press and retail samples."

Comments

heh

[jakobX]

Offered at JUST 700 dollars. Nice try anonymous Nvidia.

Re:heh

[Fwipp]

For a $150 price premium over the 290X, I'd expect more than "single-digit percentages." I know there's always a tax on the high end cards, but 27% pricier for (up to) 9% speed doesn't seem like a great trade-off.

Re:heh

[Fwipp]

Aaaaaand I just looked back at the summary and noticed the "up to 30%." I should really double-check before I post these things.

Re:heh

[Billly Gates]

Tomshardware is known to be biased as they take in ad money and partnerships with Nvidia and Intel. They put in x87 non IEEE FPU tests where Intels own chips win and declare anything AMD/ATI a loser as a result rather than real world performance. They do not test the later versions of Skyrim which have proper FPU support as an example in their benchmarks.

For a more accurate benchmark click here?

Re:heh

[PopeRatzo]

No, you were right the first time. Toms Hardware is the only site claiming these benchmark victories for the nVidia card. I'm not saying they allow their advertising department to influence their reporting and rankings, but it's a bit fishy that they're such an outlier regarding the flagship video cards of the two manufacturers.

It's also worth noting that comparing these cards without taking AMD's Mantle technology into account is to say the least, incomplete.

Re:heh

[dimeglio]

Who said you can't overclock the R9? Just add better cooling. Amazing how suddenly there's a problem because of heath.

Re:heh

[PopeRatzo]

These are both reference cards. Once Gigabyte and MSI and Sapphire get hold of them, I think the AMD's will run cooler and the nVidia cards will become a little more cost-effective.

All it all, it's great to have them actually competing.

Re:heh

[ifiwereasculptor]

Amazing how suddenly there's a problem because of heath.

Unless you're talking about The Dark Knight, you may have misspelled.

Re:compared

[Billly Gates]

Well according to those who are broke the iPhone is free of charge!

It wont cost anything to use at all compared to these silly users who pay up front ... well off to go to pay $120 a month for my 1 user phone bill. Wow I can't imagine why it is so high and why I can't leave for 2 years?!

So what?

[xhrit]

What does it matter, since no game that will be released in the next 10 years is going to need more graphics power then the shitty xbox one can crap out?

Re:So what?

[Billly Gates]

What does it matter, since no game that will be released in the next 10 years is going to need more graphics power then the shitty xbox one can crap out?

... uh Crysis and anything on 4k. This card is still not fast enough at that resolution.

Graphics still are not photorealistic yet and we have a long way to go before that happens. At 1080p these would suffice but Battle Field 4 barely plays at a lousy 40 fps at 4k even with this Titan?!

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN!

[arbiter1]

Well considering the performance hit new AMD 290 cards take cause heat, the number is a bit closer then people thing. Less you run fan at 50%+(keep in mind this is on an Open air test bench) over periods of time of gaming AMD card slows down cause heat soak in the cooler sets in so card slows down to prevent over heating. AMD had a good card on paper but failed to control heat. Biggest reason card is set to run 95c was AMD wanting to beat nvidia, problem end up being like when 7790 was released. Nvidia had a card ready to go to beat it.

Re:TITAN has one advantage...possibly

[gman003]

The other advantage of the Titan is the double-precision performance. Almost all of Nvidia's cards, including the 780 Ti, run double-precision floating-point calculations at 1/24th the rate of single-precision, but for the Titan and the Tesla pure-GPGPU cards, it's 1/3rd the rate.

While I'm not sure if that's an actual hardware difference, or if it's some software limitation, or a mix of both or whatever, it's definitely real. That's the main reason a Titan is still $1000 - it's being sold as a low-end compute card, not a high-end gaming card.

So stop using CUDA?

[dutchwhizzman]

OpenCL is the future, why use CUDA if you have a choice?

Re:So stop using CUDA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironically, in the industry I work in (computer vision, embedded signal processing, etc) - we've slowly been moving AWAY from OpenCL - it's dead/stagnant, still hasn't caught up to where CUDA was 3 years ago, and to put this in general terms, there's fragmentation among both support of STANDARD (as in, the specification) features of OpenCL and worse that prevent you using simple things like images or barriers properly.

On top of that, radically different implementations obviously have radically different optimization processes - for one particular kernel, we were looking at hitting 13 different optimizations of the same kernel/function, to target different devices.

Now days, we use CUDA - compiled to PTX (for nVidia, x86_64, and ARM NEON) and CAL for legacy AMD, HSAIL for GCN AMD, and GLSL for Intel.

Say what you will about CUDA/PTX vendor lock in, PTX is far more device agnostic than OpenCL is, just as portable (thanks to great open source efforts like LLVM (and the vendor support nVidia/AMD/Intel/etc provide) and GPUOcelot), and far more mature than HSAIL is.

That's by basis for NOT using OpenCL, where's yours?

Re:More like fully unleashed

[UnknownSoldier]

> Basically the Titan was a publicity stunt.

Right, you want to tell that to the World's #1 Super computer which has 18,688 Tesla K20X GPUs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(supercomputer)

Second, you are glossing over the fact that:

Titan = 6 GB VRAM, 780 Ti = 3 GB
Titan Float64 performance = 1/3 FP32, 780 Ti = 1:24 FP32

For gamers they couldn't give a shit about that. The fact that Titan could also game was a bonus. It was never primarily targeted at gamers just budget scientific computing.both: Process 3 TB of data (so the extra 3 GB provides a nice bonus) AND game at 120+ Hz gaming.