The GTX 770 arrives to Challenge the HD 7970 GHz Edition – 25 Games benchmarked!
Performance summary charts & graphs
Here are the summary charts of 25 games and 5 synthetic tests. The highest settings are always chosen and it is DX11 when there is a choice; DX10 is picked above DX9, and the settings are ultra or maxed. Specific settings are listed on the Main Performance charts. The benches are run at 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 with separate charts to make comparisons easier, as well as dividing games up into easy-to-read charts by their DX pathway and by resolution.
Here is the main summary chart that we call “The Bigger Picture” as it includes all 13 configurations that we tested and with all 30 benchmarks:
All results, except for Vantage, Firestrike and 3DMark11, show average framerates and higher is always better. In-game settings are fully maxed out and they are identically high or ultra across all platforms.
[**BattleForge had flashing textures with the HD 7970 that was not present in the other cards, including the HD 6990]Before we post the graphs, let’s break up the charts a bit. First up, lets compare the GTX 770 to the GTX 680 and to the earlier cards also comparing to the new Nvidia flagship, the $650 GTX 780:
In every single case, the GTX 770 is faster than the GTX 680 and it solidly outperforms the GTX 670 that it replaces not to mention the domination over the Fermi-based last generation GTX 570.
It is interesting to see the GTX 570 compared with the GTX 770 as there is approximately that 65% improvement that Nvidia claims. We even see nearly a 25% improvement over the GTX 670!
Finally, let’s see the GTX 770 at stock and at our maximum +90MHz core/+500MHz memory overclocked clocks, compared with AMD’s two top fastest single GPU cards and with the GTX 670 and GTX 680 on our chart:
The GTX 770 beats the HD 7970 GE in 15 of our 25 games; it splits two games and loses to the Ghz Edition in 8 games. Looking at all of the benchmarks, overall the GTX 770 has shifted the performance ratio in its favor and overclocking just makes it even faster. As Nvidia’s third single-GPU card in their line-up, coming in cheaper than the top AMD video card may also prove disruptive.
Let’s look at the individual charts. As usual, we begin with the synthetics.
Futuremark & Heaven synthetic tests
3DMark 2013 Firestrike is Futuremark’s latest DX11-only benchmark, 3D Mark 11 is also DX11 and Vantage is DX10. Unfortunately, scores are completely meaningless when they are presented in this way but they do offer supporting data to accompany our game benches. Vantage provides some interesting data on the GTX 770.
It seems that the memory upgrade made approximately 15% improvement in bandwidth over the GTX 680. Here are all of the synthetics compared to all of our benchmarked cards:
Synthetic tests are interesting but they are not necessarily indicative of real world gaming performance. In all three cases, the GTX770 “wins” over the mainstream cards. We see the $50 less expensive GTX 770 put up a good showing, beating the GTX 680 in every case and generally outperforming the HD 7970 GHz Edition in our 25-game benching suite.
Next up, let’s look at DX9/DX10 games.
DX9/DX10 Games
We test fairly demanding DX9 games: Serious Sam 3, BFE and Alan Wake at completely maxed out settings. We have also added Borderlands 2 with high PhysX, and the Witcher with maxed out settings including “ubersampling”. Aliens: Colonial Marines is our latest benchmark. The original Crysis is the only DX10 game that we are benching.
Now on to DX11 games.
DX11 Games
Most of our testing emphasizes DX11 games. Since the charts get too long, we break them up into charts of 6 or 7 games each.
Now the newer DX11 games
Now let’s check out our newest DX11 games:
We ran Sniper Elite V2 with the maximum in-game settings including 2.25X SuperSampling which is incredibly demanding but looks awesome compared to running with it off.
PhysX
AMD has no answer to PhysX except perhaps TressFX which involves hair, although they have promised physics support for years. Nvidia has developed their own proprietary PhysX which is used in some games to create extra immersion with particle, fluid and other physics calculations that previously usually required a separate video card just dedicated to geometry and PhysX calculations.
Due to enhancements in Kepler’s SMX architecture as well as higher clocks, it is now easier to run PhysX on high with the GTX 770 than with the older cards such as the Fermi GTX 580. Unfortunately, the way the official benchmark in Borderlands 2 is set up does not allow for an accurate comparison of PhysX on versus PhysX off.
For a proper PhysX comparison, we turn to Metro: Last Light and we can see the performance hit each of our 13 configurations take.
As you can see the GTX 770 is significantly faster than the Fermi cards. Of course, the Radeon cannot run PhysX so the CPU has this task which really makes it unplayable in the most demanding scenes.
We test PhysX in Metro: Last Light which makes great use of PhyxX and it is a shame to play it without it. In both cases, turning on PhysX, although affecting the frame rate, it is enough to play the game with fully maxed out details and AA (but not SSAA) with our GTX 770, GTX Titan and our GTX 690. We also bench with and without 2xSSAA to show the relative performance hit. Playing with SSAA enabled in Metro 2033: Last Light looks spectacular but is reserved for only for SLI and the very fastest single-GPU cards and at 1920×1080.
The HD 7970 had difficulties running the Metro: Last Light benchmark smoothly even which PhysX disabled. Perhaps a new driver update or patch will improve performance and frame delivery. We will keep our readers updated.
Let’s head for our conclusion.
