The modern GTX 1060 6GB Gaming X runs at 83FPS AVG, outpacing the former flagship 780 Ti by an impressive 22%. The 780 Ti therefore ends up just behind the 290X, with both of these being reference cards with stock settings.
At 1080p and with Very High and Ultra settings with 2xMSAA, the 780 Ti still pulls its weight at 68FPS AVG, with lows surprisingly well-spaced at 50FPS and 41FPS 1% and 0.1%. This is a 2015 launch, so it’s closer to the 780 Ti’s 2013 launch than our other test titles. Rather than our usual starting point of Sniper Elite 4 or Apex Legends, we’ll instead start with GTA V. Often the company that makes the card, but sometimes us (see article) Understanding why performance behaves the way it does is critical for future expansion of our own knowledge, and thus prepares our content for smarter analysis in the future.įor the test bench proper, we are now using the following components: GPU Test Bench (Sponsored by Corsair) If we know that performance boosts harder at 4K than 1080p, we might be able to call this indicative of a ROPs advantage, for instance. More importantly, this allows us to start pinpointing the reason for performance uplift, rather than just saying there is performance uplift. This includes 4K, 1440p, and 1080p, which allows us to determine GPU scalability across multiple monitor types. We are also testing most games at all three popular resolutions – at least, we are for the high-end. Game graphics settings are defined in their respective charts. Longevity: Regardless of popularity, how long can we reasonably expect that a game will go without updates? Updating games can hurt comparative data from past tests, which impacts our ability to cross-compare new data and old, as old data may no longer be comparable post-patch.Popularity: Is it something people actually play?.We will include more Vulkan API testing as more games ship with Vulkan API: We have chosen a select group of DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 API integrations, as these are the most prevalent at this time.Unreal Engine), we can ensure that we are representing a wide sweep of games that just use the built-in engine-level optimizations By choosing one game from each major engine (e.g. Game Engine: Most games run on the same group of popular engines.In order to better optimize our time available and test “smarter” (rather than “more,” which was one of our previous goals), we have selected games based upon the following criteria: Our games selection is a careful one: Time is finite, and having analyzed our previous testing methodologies, we identified shortcomings where we were ultimately wasting time by testing too many games that didn’t provide meaningfully different data from our other tested titles. Most notably, we have overhauled the host test bench and had updated with new games.
Testing methodology has completely changed from our last GPU reviews, which were probably for the GTX 1070 Ti series cards. This is amplified by significant memory changes, capacity being the most notable, where the GTX 780 Ti’s standard configuration was limited to 3GB and ~7Gbps GDDR5.
It is no surprise then that the 780 Ti’s 2880 CUDA cores, although high even by today’s standards ( an RTX 20, but outperforms the 780 Ti), will underperform when compared to modern architectures.
A 1:1 Maxwell versus Kepler comparison, were such a thing possible, would position Maxwell as superior in efficiency and performance-per-watt, if not just outright performance. When NVIDIA moved from Kepler to Maxwell, there was nearly a 40% efficiency gain when CUDA cores are processing input. NVIDIA’s architecture has undergone significant changes since Kepler and the 780 Ti, one of which has been a change in CUDA core efficiency.
Our overclocks on the 780 Ti reference (with fan set to 93%) allowed it to exceed expected performance of the average partner model board, so we have a fairly full range of performance on the 780 Ti. Overclocking was also more extensible, giving us a bigger upward punch than modern NVIDIA overclocking might permit. It was a different era: Memory capacity was limited to 3GB on the 780 Ti, memory frequency was a blazing 7Gbps, and core clock was 875MHz stock or 928MHz boost, using the old Boost 2.0 algorithm that kept a fixed clock in gaming. The 780 Ti shipped for $700 MSRP and landed as NVIDIA’s flagship against AMD’s freshly-launched flagship. We recently revisited the AMD R9 290X from October of 2013, and now it’s time to look back at the GTX 780 Ti from November of 2013.