The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Review
by Ryan Smith on November 7, 2013 9:01 AM ESTMetro: Last Light
As always, kicking off our look at performance is 4A Games’ latest entry in their Metro series of subterranean shooters, Metro: Last Light. The original Metro: 2033 was a graphically punishing game for its time and Metro: Last Light is in its own right too. On the other hand it scales well with resolution and quality settings, so it’s still playable on lower end hardware.
For the bulk of our analysis we’re going to be focusing on our 2560x1440 results, as monitors at this resolution will be what we expect a single GTX 780 Ti to be primarily used with. A single card does have the necessary horsepower to drive a 4K monitor on its own, but only at lower quality settings. Even as powerful as GTX 780 Ti is, a pair of them will be needed to get good framerates out of most games if using 4K at high quality settings.
Looking at our Metro: Last Light results then, it’s the start of what’s going to be a fairly consistent streak for the GTX 780 Ti. Though it doesn’t improve on GTX Titan or GTX 780’s gaming performance by leaps and bounds, the additional SMX and increased clockspeeds means that it has little trouble pulling away from those cards and from AMD’s 290 series. As a result the GTX 780 Ti beats the GTX Titan by 11%, GTX 780 by 19%, and though it’s closer than normal, the lead over the 290X stands at 6%.
To that end in Metro it leads the pack of single-GPU cards, though it does come up just short of being able to average 60 frames per second at 2560. Anything over 60fps will require multiple GPUs; and even then GTX 780 Ti is fast enough that sometimes even a pair of GPUs (GTX 770 SLI) isn’t going to be appreciably faster.
Meanwhile looking at GTX 780 Ti SLI performance, the SLI setup tops the charts at 2560 for everything short of the 290X in uber mode, though in this case (like most cases) two high-end GPUs is on the verge of being overkill even at 2560. Otherwise looking at 4K, NVIDIA’s poor 4K scaling on Metro once again makes itself present here, with NVIDIA’s performance only minimally benefitting from the second card. In the case of Metro at 4K, the 290X CF is going to be by far the faster option.
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FuriousPop - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
lol. you do realize that those of us running surround/eyefinity need to have a bench to relate to this. Thats what 4k does for us, its not much but its better than just that standard 1600p.in actual fact i am currently gaming close to 8k resolution (eyefinity) so before you rage, take a breath!
yeeeeman - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
And, after this replica from nVidia, the 290X still seems the right choice. You strap a water block on it, and it goes like 780Ti, has more memory (4GB) and consumes aprox. the same. You have to be extremely stubborn not to admit the fact that 290X is the right card to get.Kutark - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
Right, cus the 90-140 dollars for the water block, also making the assumption that you already have all the other requisite shit for water cooling TOTALLY makes it worth it.For someone buying a new card, if they dont already have a water cooling setup, water cooling is a COMPLETE non option.
hero4hire - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Can buy aftermarket air coolers for >$100 too. Only for the tinkerers. I'd rather just see what an aftermarket does and not pretend I'm better. Amd has a laughably bad reference cooler which is why it's so easy to see the weak link. If we didn't see a large performance jump at 100% (60%) fan throttle I'd just call the 290 a bust and move on. I won't buy this gen but I am very interested just as an overclock erscook9 - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
AnandTech, PLEASE PLEASE test the 780 Ti against the R9 290x and R9 290 with all of them watercooled at stock clocks. This will be the only real way to tell what card is better than the other with temperatures removed from the equation as clearly temperature wildly influences the overall performance capabilities of these cards.Thanks!
Yojimbo - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Haha if you are going to watercool them, why test them at stock clocks? Because AMD is already more-or-less overclocking their cards and you want to cast AMD in a better light? If you are going to watercool them, then overclock each card aggressively, and test them that way.eanazag - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
I'm not sold on the Ti being that strong of a champ. I will say that Nvidia's cooler is by far better and AMD should take note - especially since AMD's temp limit is high. I don't have money for either 780 + or R290 +, but if I was spending Nvidia's position in any category doesn't justify the price. Their wins are not impressive enough for that. $50 more over the R290x is reasonable. The overclocking options look good; without overclocking R290X + $25.looncraz - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Is it just me or do the performance charts not mate up with the words?What I mean is that the charts will show the 290X, in uber mode, beating the 780Ti by 2-3FPS almost across the board and then the text in the article will declare the 780Ti the winner. This is most obvious on the Crysis: Warhead page.
"with the additional performance offered by the GTX 780 Ti NVIDIA is once again at the top, though only by a margin of under 2fps"
That isn't true any way you shake it. The 290X in quiet mode loses by 1.2FPS - at worst - and in uber mode it wins by 2.2FPS.
All I see in the charts from the 780Ti is a card with a slight average advantage at lower resolutions and a more significant loss at higher resolutions. Not a bad card, but I'd call it a tie if anything... a performance difference in the range of 2% between the 290X and Titan was considered a tie... why not now?
mac2j - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Totally agree - and the reviews on other sites are much more balanced from what I've seen so far. I don't think of Ryan as someone who is generally overtly biased, but if you look at the numbers this looks like a huge win for the 290X. In most games the 2 cards are +/- 5% of each other which wouldn't even justify a $100 premium much less $150. On top of that the 290X seems to scale better in CF. Just my interpretation based on the games I play but the "final words" seems very slanted and the "11%" over 290X seems very biased as its not based on Uber mode.venkman - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Maybe this has been asked before, but when are we going to see Benchmarks with the 2013 Fall Games? Battlefield 4/COD: Ghosts/Batman/AC4 etc?