Gadgetory

we revisiting the GTX 780 Ti is gaming performance in the modern era landing it on charts with this year's major releases from both AMD and NVIDIA a couple of the benchmarks also contained Maxwell and 300 series cards for further scaling analysis and just recently we did this same test with the GTX 770 to show upgrade pathways for three to four year old hardware and we'll be looking next at AMD cards for the 200 series so stay subscribed for that before getting to that this coverage is brought to you by catalyst energy Mint's for long pc building sessions that the Mint's contain caffeine taurine b-vitamins in Siberian eleuthero with no sugar learn more about the energy drink alternative in the link below use code gamers nexus for a 5 percent discount we're not going to completely review this card it is a bit hold at this point we'll be looking at power and thermals but we'll be looking at gaming performance and the 780 Ti runs on NVIDIA zat Kepler architecture this preceeds maxwell and obviously Pascal the most recent architecture and that means a couple of important points that we have to sort of remind everyone of one this uses GPU boost 2.0 functions a bit differently than 3.0 this is a reference card as well that we've got on the table and that's when we benchmarked it operates at a boost clock of 928 mega Hertz again because 2.0 a bit different and in terms of other core specs the core count is 2880 cuda cores but the very important thing to hear here to note is that kepler cores are quite a bit different than the later generation cores and that's generally true between all architectures for recent years anyway so verses later cores that the architecture that came out more recently Kepler was something like 40% less efficient per watt depending on which architecture you looking at Pascal or Maxwell and that means that on these older cards you'll see a higher core count then maybe the performance looks like it makes sense at least versus the modern benchmark so note that and then things like data path optimization clock gating Delta memory compression color compression all these technologies that improve the performance per watt the changes there really do make a huge difference for the modern architectures on both AMD and NVIDIA other specs for the 780ti include a seven gigabit per second memory clock a bit slower than modern devices and it's also running three gigabytes of gddr5 memory on a 384 bit memory interface the TDP of the reference card is 250 watts a fair bit higher than today is significantly more powerful GTX 1080 and it's 180 watts EDP a lot of gaming power savings are in lower voltage process too so moving to FinFET from planar gets you down to about 0.8 volts at the low end rather than 1 volt gddr5 X on the GTX 1080 and Titan XP also reduce the voltage requirement and compressing colors and memory reduces the power consumed per bit transacted the 780ti had a launch price of about $700 putting it sort of close to the gtx 1080 for today and that means if you owned one when it came out in November of 2013 you were pretty much the king of the graphics market so for today we're revisiting the gaming performance I'm sure a lot of folks still have these and might be looking to upgrade in the next year or two if not immediately we're not looking at production workloads so the way the older architecture was built does mean that the performance scaling in some production workloads may actually better than what we're looking at for gaming scaling but that's out of scope for today so we're looking at FPS only and we'll start off with battlefield 1 a couple of the newer games if you have curiosities about some of the older titles including shadow of Mordor we also tested the recent Mirror's Edge catalyst you can hit the link in the description below for the article and the full benchmark with a couple of extra charts and the full testing methodology including all the drivers used for the devices and other notes that may be important we only tested battlefield 1 using DirectX 11 since dx12 has generally shown poor performance in frame times in our previous tests look at doom 4 Vulcan though so stick around for that the reference 780ti performs at about 58 FPS average at 1080p ultra and battlefield 1 that's where the low is reasonably close at 40 7.7 fps and 40 5.3 fps although NVIDIA has improved its frame time consistency generationally everything since Kepler has still been pretty tightly time than we're seeing that reflected in these 780ti comparatively this performance puts us adjacent to the GTX 960 SSC from Maxwell and that's of course a pre overclocked card a reasonably heavily pre over talked card and about tied with this generations GTX 1050 Ti we're above the rx 460 by about 15 fps and that's some meaningful gap and below the RX 470 by about 15 fps right in between the two strictly looking at same brand generational jeonse the 142 $160 1050 t is offer effectively equivalent gaming performance in battlefield one to the one skin 780ti being that the 780 Ti was a $700 card a modern price equivalent shy anyway of the 1080 Ti which doesn't exist yet would be the GTX 1080 and that lands us at such high frame rate that we really should look at the next chart for a better idea at 1440p ultra with battlefield 1 we see the GTX 1080 landing at around 116 FPS average compared to the 780 Ti Kepler card at 38.7 average high resolution gameplay has changed significantly in the last two generations even for mid-range $200 cars if you see the 1016 480 and the RX 4 80 for instance blows the 780ti high away in 1440p performance gtx 1060 is right there with it nearly doubling the 780 Ti in 1440p with ultra settings moving on to doom we'll look at both OpenGL and Vulcan performance on the GTX 780 Ti at 1080p ultra with OpenGL we're seeing a performance output of approximately 64 FPS average on the 780 Ti still plenty playable for 1080p gaming but comparatively not so impressive 780 Ti sits between the 1050 and 1050 Ti and is well below the rx 470 480 and GTX 1060 with Vulcan our averages negatively scale on the 780 Ti fps goes from about 64 average to 53 average and although they're not shown in this OpenGL and Vulcan comparison the lows for the 780 Ti fall to about 33 and 25.6 fps not particularly impressive 1440p Ultra is more of the same the 780 Ti operates an average frame rate of 45 FPS at 1440p with OpenGL with lows around 31 FPS and 25 a7 FP this plant says just under the rh4 70s average and about 20 FPS below the gtx 1060 and rx 480 the GTX 970 SSC also does well here with a 70 FPS average jump into the modern price equivalent of the 780 Ti performance goes up to around 125 to 130 FPS average or about 3x the 780 Ti is performance when we look at the GTX 1080 Vulcan mostly post similar scaling to the last chart with an average FPS about 40 and low at 27 and 25 really you're better off with OpenGL in this particular title with this card call of duty black ops 3 is next operating at 1080p and 1440p with high settings at 1080p we're seeing an average frame rate of about 90 FPS with lows at 59 1% and 49.1% this lens the 780ti about 10 FPS ahead of the 1050 Ti and below the 970 SSE and even the 380 X if that sounds odd keep in mind that black ops 3 has favored AMD for its entire lifespan we've shown that consistently over the last year so this is not abnormal behavior for this particular title when looking at AMD and NVIDIA 1440p it has the same stack up for the 780 Ti the GTX 1080 operates at around 143 FPS average 980ti is at 103 and a 780ti is at 56 that's nearly a 3x difference between Kepler and Pascal or about 2 X between Kepler and Maxwell we're throwing back now to Metro last light for a game that's been around for ages was optimized eons ago and hasn't seen many changes in drivers or game performance since that time at 1080p with very high quality and high tessellation natural last light gives us a good look at 780ti scaling over the years on older titles which it was built for its operating at 79 FPS average just between the RX 484 gigabyte and 1063 gigabyte the 980 TI for reference operates at around 109 average with the GTX 1080 at around 135 average 1440p with Metro is mostly the same hierarchy unsurprisingly 780 Ti sits now at 56 FPS average and still pretty reasonable but feels a bit limp compared to the equally the GTX 1063 gigabyte card same memory capacity and the our X 480 gaming x8 gigabyte card does quite well comparatively operating at around 57 FPS average GTA 5 is a 2015 title that remains relevant through this year and offers us a mid step between the brand new games and the old guard like Metro the 780ti pushes 74 FPS average with lows in the 50s when playing GTA 5 at 1080p with very high and ultra quality settings effectively maxed out other than the advanced graphics tab this lands the card ahead of the 380 X and the 1050 Ti which is a bit different from our very first results just because of how GTA 5 is optimized the 780 Ti ends up a bit below the 1060 again and the RX 470 again it is consistent in this regard and effectively always tied or behind the gtx 1060 this is particularly true with 1440p we haven't retested every device yet at 1440p with GTA 5 but our limited list of results shows the 1064 70 and 480 performing against the 780 Ti and the 1016 480 outperform the 780 Ti and these results it's been almost exactly three years since the GTX 780 Ti came out and the card hasn't aged so well if we look at other GPUs this seems pretty expected really at the 770 was further proof of this they really just as technology advances and as even the console generations mature and the developers mature their process for developing games on those current gen consoles because that does sort of dictate a lot of the gaming today the development of games today these cards have not done too well to scale the performance now the 780 Ti is still a damn good card it does 1080p just fine it's still hitting high frame rates in all of these tests for 1080p it's only when you start pushing higher resolutions that the card struggles and that's sort of where the new trend is the trend for this year has been supporting things like 1440p with $200 video cards that's new $250 gets you a card that can pretty reasonably perform about 60fps depending on the game with the gtx 1060 RX for 80 something like that and run 1440p with ultra high graphics the 780 Ti just can't do it you could lower your graphics settings of course and still play the high resolution but for enthusiasts who still want that bleeding-edge higher resolution higher quality technology obviously it's about time to upgrade now there's still a bit more life left in the 780ti you could easily get another year and still be playing out pretty high settings high very high ultra as the sort of three categories you would be in while at 1080p but if looking to upgrade resolutions then the card is next in terms of upgrades it doesn't make a ton of sense to move to something like an RX 480 or gtx 1060 they do outperform the 780 Ti but they feel sort of like lateral upgrades and although I haven't tested it you might lose some performance in production workloads where the additional cores although less efficient would be favored the 1070 would be a more worthwhile gain and of course the new year should yield Vega products which will undoubtedly be targeting the high-end market likely caused some price wars but between what's out now 1070 1080 are the obvious only choices really I would not necessarily recommend an Rx 480 or GTX 1060 as your upgrade things look out for would be how do the prices change for the 10 eighties they've settled down a bit so if you remember launch they were all pretty much over the low end MSRP that's kind of calmed down it's easier to justify a purchase now 1080 TI will come out at some point so if you really need that TI branding to feel relevant then I guess wait around for it but otherwise you've got the only two cards to look at other than waiting for things like Vega and the 1080 TI so that is all for this time as always patreon link in the post roll video to help us out directly subscribe for more content linked in the description below for the full article with all the charts and extras I'll see you all next time don't worry I'll just hit the IO