Gadgetory

we've had enough suggestions lately to revisit older architecture cards ideally two generations back this is the gtx 770 and today we are sort of reviewing it we're rebadging it to look at how it compares against modern cards because it's about the upgrade cycle for owners of the gtx 770 it's been out three years now came out in May of 2013 so it's about time for folks to be looking around for upgrades though it does still do pretty ok in most games before getting to the benchmarks this coverage is brought to you by an tech and their new cube mini ITX case designed by Razer and equipped with tinted acrylic windows on most the sides if you want to learn more about the box hit the link of the description below recapping the gtx 770 for those who don't quite remember all the specs this card operates on kepler architecture which preceded Nvidia's maxwell and current pascal GPU architectures at the time and these most direct competition was the 200 series and that included the r9 280 and r9 280x cards the gtx 770 shipped in two gigabyte and later four gigabyte quantities with reference using two gigabytes of memory and that's what we have here the gtx 770 host 1536 cuda cores with a base clock of 1046 megahertz and boost of 1085 but there are a few important things to note here first of all a chord is not necessarily equal a core between architecture is going from kepler to maxwell you could see some generational improvements in the core architecture where even upwards of 40% there was a performance per watt gain and that maintains with the pascal architecture andy does it with polaris over their previous architectures so cores do not necessarily and generally almost never scale linearly from one generation to the next because just the block diagram layout alone if you look at that you can see a good number of differences one architecture to the next so don't look at this 1536 CUDA cores and just immediately compare it to something like a 1060 with 1280 CUDA cores and assume a 770 will therefore be better because that's not quite how it works clock rate also is not quite as simple as well the last generation or two generations ago at this point was a thousand megahertz so now they're almost two thousand megahertz that doesn't mean there's a 2x gain and performance either necessarily that we see that in some cases but the clock rate alone does have a lot of variables especially with Nvidia with boost 3.0 so just some disclaimers to make notes it's better to just go off of the actual test data than to go off of speculation for architectural changes or focusing solely on FPS testing for today we also only have this gtx 770 - gigabyte reference unit so your overclocked models may vary in performance if you've got some of those it's still a strong baseline for performance though and will give you at least an idea of where your 770 performs and you can probably extrapolate from there test methodology and more in-depth information as always to be found in the article link to the description below if you're curious about how we tested anything or why or what drivers we used we're starting with Battlefield 1 which again testing methodology is defined pretty heavily in our bf1 GPU review and benchmarks and that's posted on the website looking at 1080p ultra performance with DirectX 11 we're ignoring DX 12 for now for this card the GTX 770 is capable of outputting 43 FPS average with lows around 37 and 35 fps that lands the card just below believe it or not with the GTX 1050 a $110 card is capable of and about the same as what the rx 460 does is another card that this one specifically because 4 gigabyte model is around 120 $130 but still not that expensive of a card if this sounds too low keep in mind that the generational changes also mean waning driver support and optimizations for older hardware and that's important the drivers used to do have optimized the battlefield 1 performance for Kepler but the 770 with 2 gigabytes of vram is still well below the gtx 1050 TI and is approximately three times lower than the gtx 1070 considering the 770 was originally $400 at launch the gtx 1070 would be both the namesake replacement and the accurate price point replacement for the 770 also about a $400 card and such an upgrade it moves performance from below 50 FPS to above 120 fps average at 1080p with this 1070 sustaining it lows well above 60fps even just upgrading to an rx 470 would be worthwhile in some ways anyway and at an affordable price but a 200 dollar investment in a GTX 1060 or our X 480 would yield better frame rate for the 1064 example you'd be nearing 100 FPS at 1080p if you're upgrading your GPU but keeping the current monitor one of these devices 470 480 or 1060 would make a lot of sense because a 1440p monitor upgrade in step with the GPU would match better with a gtx 1070 upgrade with doom at 1080p and using OpenGL we're seeing the GTX 770 output a frame rate of about 44 FPS average with 0.1% lows that dip near in 20 fps this places the card right around the gtx 950 and RX 460 both low-end devices that almost feel like they should totally worse from the 770 even though we've seen that twice that they're not necessarily worse the GTX 1050 Ti meanwhile operates at around 72 FPS average with the GTX 1060 gaming X at 101 three average when we switch over to Vulcan performance still has the 770 around 40 FPS average easily outperformed by nearly every other card in the stack looking at black ops 3 with the memory limitations disabled we're posting an average FPS of 66 at 1080p with high settings the 165 dollar msi gtx 1050 TI gaming ex meanwhile is operating at 78 FPS average with the lows closer to 60fps the 380 ex outperforms the 770 pretty reasonably but this is a title which tends to show Andy more favor than in some other games the GTX 1060 provides a 2x performance gain over the 770 the 1070 provides nearly a 3x performance gain and the AR X 480 gaming X also post performance about double what the GTX 770 can output if we look at older games like Metro last light we see the GTX 770 is able to keep up better with the 1050 1050 Ti and r9 380 X we think this demonstrates well the difference is that driver support can make since newer games will get their most immediate and higher prioritized driver development focused on the flagship architectures from each vendor Metro hasn't needed updates for some time now it's stable and pretty old and that makes it stagnant in both game and driver updates the GTX 770 does pretty well here relative it's performance elsewhere 1070 outperforms the 770 by about 2x so not quite as Extreme as the last charts with a 1080 beginning to cap out against the performance ceiling with the CPU GTA 5 is a hard-hitting title that released last year and so had a good mix of support for Kepler and 200 series cards at launch the GTX 770 is able to drive 62 FPS average with very high and ultra graphics effectively maxed other than the advanced graphics tab which is left all disabled and that is flanked by the r9 380 X and GTX 10:50 cards the 1050 Ti keeps its trend of at least slightly outpacing the 770 in this case that's by about 4 to 5 FPS average and the RX 470 is also keeping its trend in this case it's 15 FPS ahead or a 24% change the RX 488 gigabyte card operates at 85 FPS average or 37.5% change with the gtx 1070 offering nearly a 2x gain in performance still though the 770 is what you'd consider playable at for GTA 5 at these settings check the link in the description below for more Mirror's Edge catalyst benchmarks and some other information for the most part the GTX 770 is still pretty capable of playing modern games you just have to reduce the quality settings and if that's not desirable then upgrades do obviously make sense this is a good time to upgrade because one there's been a major architectural shift just in the fabrication process alone and generally we do tend to recommend skipping one generation so in this case that would be the 9 series or the 970 right here and go into something else we're either 1070 or somewhere else in the stack that I'll talk about in a moment so this is a good time to do that if you do prefer keeping those higher graphics settings but battlefield 1 you can still play it you just really do have to tank the quality of it the most linear step would be the gtx 1070 which offers anywhere from a 2 to 3x performance gain depending on the games tested this jump would also allow you to upgrade to a 1440p monitor or greater and would almost really encourage it if trying to keep a 1080p monitor set up to stretch out investment a bit longer in your display find something like an Rx 480 or GTX 1060 would make the most sense as a mid costed option and you can check out views on different aiv partner models of those cards if you want to learn more the arts 470 does post reasonable performance gains over the 770 upwards of 24 percent in some titles you can get them for around 170 hundred eighty dollars now but it just doesn't quite feel worth the upgrade when considering the relative performance jump so something like an Rx 480 or gtx 960 model if you've had this card for three years already you're stretching your investment out pretty well as is so as I've said in the last few reviews of the earlier architecture releases for Pascal and Polaris the AR X 480 we talked about this the 470 talked about it and then the gtx 1070 1080 and 1060 the thing is the industry looks like it's pretty much ready for 1440p gaming at this point on all those devices certainly and it's really not often that we talk about upgrading a video card in step with the monitor because in the past it's at least the last few years you've pretty much had a step from one 1080p display with one video card to the same 1080p display probably with a new video card because it just hasn't been a reason to step up performance hasn't been there maxwell began changing that a bit and some of the hawaii cards but now it looks like 1440p is properly really playable on all these devices that are modern that includes the arts 480 not shown on the table but we've talked about that in those reviews so that's the sort of interesting part here is if you are upgrading from something like a 770 to something a bit higher end in the stack which again a 1070 would be your most linear step I would not recommend the founder's edition model by the way we've talked about that in the past though but a heavy partner models are are a bit more price favorable but if you're doing a linear step like that really for the most part you are pushing frame rates that will support the 1440p displays unless you really really want 120 144 Hertz gaming in which case you're still going to be on 1080p so things to think about but overall that 770 is holding up decently but a bit better than the older titles where driver optimizations not really creating the class disparity we're seeing it with something like battlefield one in the meantime hopefully that provides a look at two generation old performance we'll be doing more of these in the future for other cards that are not the 770 hit the links in the description below for more information patreon like the personal video helped us out directly and subscribe for more content I'll see you all next time