Nvidia’s GTX 760 arrives to take direct aim at the HD 7950

Today Nvidia is announcing its brand new $249 replacement for the $299 GTX 660 Ti which is now taking direct aim at the HD 7950. The GTX 760 is a new GPU with 6 SMX units and 1152 Cores which is less than the GTX 660 Ti’s and GTX 670’s 7 SMXes and 1344 cores.  However, the GTX 760 is on a 256-bit memory bus making it potentially faster than the 192-bit width bus of the GTX 660 Ti, and only slightly less powerful than the GTX 670 due to its faster clocks.   There are also new additions to the 700 series incorporated in the new GTX 760 which include the Titan’s and the GTX 7×0’s Boost 2.0 controls, and adaptive fan controls.

The GTX 760’s design is very similar to the GTX 600 series as it does not share the reference industrial design of the GTX 770 and 780 which uses more expensive cooling.  Although these other cards are aimed at the very highest end of PC gaming, the GTX 760 is a video card that attempts to exceed the performance of the GTX 660 Ti and is aimed at the upper-midrange end of the mainstream PC gamers; Nvidia’s “sweetspot” for 1920×1080 gaming.   The GTX 660 Ti was aimed at the Radeon HD 7870 while the GTX 760 is designed to take on the HD 7950.

At $249, Nvidia is attempting to offer more than the performance of the GTX 660 Ti which launched at $299 and to nearly equal the performance of the GTX 670 which launched at $399 last year.  With the launch of this card, here is Nvidia’s line-up until the Fall, then depending on how AMD responds, we may see further additions to their lineup.

Two years ago, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti launched at $249 and became a popular graphics upgrade option for gamers.  Like the GeForce GTX 760, it features a 256-bit memory interface, but with its 1GB frame buffer, the GTX 560 Ti has half the memory of the GTX 760 and considerably less memory bandwidth. We will use our modern 25-game benchmark suite to see if Nvidia has succeeded in bringing higher performance to this important $250 price segment of the market.  We already witnessed how the older DX10 8800-GTX and GTX 280 have aged (badly) in a DX11 gaming world.

The specifications of the GTX 760 are quite impressive as Nvidia’s new fourth card in their lineup and what is especially impressive is the $249 price, if the performance is there.  We have been benching and playing games with the GTX 760 for the past week under NDA and it has been a very good experience that we would like to share with you.

We have continued benching right where our recent GTX 770 testing left off – adding the GTX 760 as well as the Fermi GTX 560 Ti, and the Kepler GTX 660 Ti it is replacing.  Here is our complete testbed of competing cards, and we shall test modern 25 games and 5 synthetics using Core i7-3770K at 4.5GHz, EVGA’s Z77 FTW motherboard and 16GB of Kingston “Beast” 2133MHz HyperX DDR3:

• GTX 760
• GTX 760 Overclock
• GTX 770
• GTX 780
• GTX Titan (GK110 current special purpose Kepler – gaming multi-display/compute)
• GTX 690 (GK114 – current dual-GPU Kepler flagship)
• GTX 680 (GK114, single-GPU Kepler flagship – recently replaced by the GTX 780)
• GTX 670 (GK114, single-GPU Kepler 2nd in the lineup – recently replaced by the GTX 770)
• GTX 660 Ti (GK114, single-GPU $299 Kepler – now being replaced by the $249 GTX 760)
• GTX 580 (GF110 – former single-GPU Fermi flagship)
• GTX 570 (GF110, single GPU second card in the Fermi lineup)
• GTX 560 Ti (GF110, single GPU $249 card in the Fermi lineup)
• GTX 590 (GF110 – former dual-GPU Fermi flagship)
• HD 7970 GHz Edition (Tahiti – current AMD single GPU flagship)
• HD 7970 (Tahiti – mainstream original AMD single-GPU flagship)
• HD 6990 (Cayman – former AMD dual-GPU flagship)

Although AMD’s Catalyst drivers have shown good performance improvements last year, Nvidia has retaken the single-GPU performance crown away from AMD with their new mainstream $650 flagship GTX 780 and also beat or equaled the HD 7970 GHz edition with the $399 GTX 770.  In response, we have witnessed AMD drop the pricing on the HD 7970s and offer large game bundles.  Now Nvidia is aiming at the $250 HD 7950s and the slightly more expensive Boost and overclocked versions.  We are going to use our PowerColor reference HD 7970 to stand in for a highly overclocked Boost Edition of the HD 7950.

This evaluation will primarily pit the stock and overclocked GTX 760 against against our PowerColor reference design HD 7970 at stock speeds, using 25 modern games and 5 synthetic benchmarks at 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 resolutions.  We shall also pay particular attention to the rest of Nvidia’s lineup including the card that the GTX 760 is replacing – the GTX 660 Ti; and also to the $249 Fermi GTX 560 Ti from just one generation ago to see how much performance has increased – or not.

And we will also look very closely at the next generation graphics in Metro: Last Light to compare PhysX ‘on’ versus ‘off’ to see if the $249 GTX 760 can run it on Very High.

What’s New with the GTX 760?

Nvidia’s marketing buzzwords for the original GTX 600 series launch were, “Faster. Smoother. Richer.” The GTX 760 is also designed for extreme efficiency and high performance and we note that it’s TDP is 170W requiring two 6-pin PCIe power connectors. However, one thing that we have noted is that the GTX 760 is noticeably noisier than the GTX 770/780 and although its fan speed is more consistent, it is very similar to the reference GTX 670.

Faster

The GTX 770’s Kepler architecture is SMX-based with 1152 CUDA cores.  Although it  has less cores than the GTX 670 or GTX 660 Ti, it retains the 256-bit memory interface of the GTX 670 which is higher than the 192-bit interface of the GTX 660 Ti.  We also see the GTX 760 has higher clocks than the GTX 660 Ti or the the GTX 670, with a base clock of 980MHz and a boost clock to 1033MHz.  In addition, Nvidia brings “GPU Boost 2” – a more dynamic way to boost clocks speeds and maximize performance for each game, now based on temperature also instead of just on assumed power draw as in the original Boost.

Smoother

New kinds of anti-aliasing – FXAA and TXAA – now compete with MSAA in terms of IQ while not sacrificing as much performance. And there is a new “Adaptive VSync” that helps to reduce tearing and stuttering associated with regular VSync.

While average frames per second (FPS) are the most popular and also an important performance measurement for comparing videocards, the smooth delivery of frames is just as crucial. Great hardware needs great software to support it, and Nvidia is also a software company. They claim to give a lot of attention to how the frames are delivered with a special eye on reducing lag and input delay and thus minimizing jitter.  We have noted this in our own Fraps frame time latency benching.

Nvidia gives more voltage unlocking options with the GTX 760 than with the rest of the Kepler 600 series GPUs. The new GeForce GTX 700 series GPUs feature their second generation GPU Boost technology – the cooler the GPU operates, the faster it performs. Boost 2.0 also gives gamers more powerful controls for tweaking their GPU.

Now users can set a target temperature, and for enthusiasts who wish to overclock their GPU, Boost 2.0 also supports overvoltage which can stabilize higher clocks for overclocking.

Richer

With GTX 760/770/780 as with the rest of the GTX 600 series plus Titan, it is possible to play games spanning 3 displays in Surround or in 3D Surround from a single GeForce GPU, something Fermi could not manage. And the GTX 700 series brings two dual-link DVI connectors plus HDMI and a DisplayPort for a 4th accessory display.

There are even more features launched with the GTX 700 series.

Quieter

How about quieter? The 700 series together with Titan introduces a new adaptive fan controller that uses a better algorithm to minimize fan speed fluctuations which result in a quieter experience without the fan constantly revving up and down.  In actual practice, this works great for the GTX 770 and above, but the fan noise is more noticeable on this card – it’s about equivalent to a GTX 670 and a little noisier than a GTX 680.

New Software – Shadowplay and GeForce Experience

The GeForce Experience (GFE) came out of beta with the launch of the GTX 770 and became a regular feature for Nvidia gamers. No longer does one have to (although many of us love to) fiddle with settings to find the best combination for our own particular PC hardware combination.

Just one optimize button customizes the settings for a “best playable experience” for your particular hardware.Shadowplay is touted as a better alternative to Fraps when it comes to recording video. The compression is much better and the overhead from recording ones own game is much lower.Shadowplay should be available to Kepler owners this Summer and we will bring you details of it when it launches.

How does the GTX 760 compare with its rival, AMD’s HD 7950 at $280+ and its game bundles, and is it worth $249?

Here is the big question: How does the GTX 760 which is launching today at $249 compare with the GTX 660 Ti starting at $280 bundled with Metro: Last Light and the HD 7950 also starting out at about $280 with a 4-game bundle? This is an interesting situation that may prove disruptive to pricing as the GTX 760 appears to promise to beat the HD 7950 and even the more expensive Boost editions.

First, let’s take a closer look at the new GTX 760 and directly compare it to the GTX 660 Ti as well as the GTX . First of all, in the “looks” department, the GTX 770 looks very much like the 600 series cards, not the more expensive 700 series cards.  However, looks are superficial and we need to look deeper.