The GTX 780 Ti is unleashed on PowerColor’s 290X OC

Nvidia is releasing its new flagship today.  The $699 GeForce GTX 780 Ti is based on its fully-enabled GK110 GPU on 28nm Kepler DX11 architecture. This new 7.1 billion transistor single-GPU flagship card is the culmination of Nvidia’s Kepler strategy for a mainstream yet exotic card that is aimed at the highest end of PC gamers with a card that is faster than the Titan.

The GTX 780 Ti’s industrial design is very similar to the GTX 690 and to the Titan which are already aimed at gamers who want the very fastest video card at any cost. However, the Titan, and to a lesser extent the GTX 690, are special-purpose cards while the GTX 780 Ti is a video card that attempts to capture the performance of the highest-end cards and is aimed at the highest end of PC gamers.

The GTX 780 Ti is Nvidia’s brand-new single-GPU flagship video card based on GK110 just as the $1000 Titan and the now $500 GTX 780 are.  At $699, the GTX 780 Ti replaces the GTX 780 which was recently selling for about $650, and both are offered with a 3-game Holiday Bundle including Assassin’s Creed IV–Black Flag, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist and Batman: Arkham Origins.  This time, Nvidia is aiming for well above GTX Titan performance on a single card but with 3GB of vRAM instead of 6GB.  The GTX 780 Ti ships with fully enabled SMX units and with higher clocks, but without the double precision the Titan offers as a special-purpose card.

AMD’s R9 290X Challenge

When AMD released the R9 290X, they intended to beat the $650 GTX 780 and the $1000 Titan with a $550 card.  Nvidia quickly responded by dropping the price of the GTX 780 to $499 and they also included a 3-game Holiday bundle of 3 very popular games as well as a $100 Shield discount.   On Tuesday of this week, AMD cranked up the fan and the clockspeed of their newest 2nd card, the $400 R9 290 (no X), and aimed once again for GTX 780 performance.

However, Nvidia is determined to take back the performance crown with the GTX 780 Ti.  ABT managed to get a PowerColor R9 290X BF4 edition from Newegg on Tuesday evening.  This card is the “OC” (Overclock) model that is clocked +30MHz over stock.  We will devote a full evaluation to this card later this week, but it runs relatively cool in Uber mode and almost never throttles.  It is perhaps an excellent predictor of the aftermarket cards that may be able to maintain 1000(plus) MHz during extended gaming.  This will be an excellent test of the GTX 780 Ti versus an overclocked R9 290X that rarely throttles in Uber mode.

What’s New with the GTX 780 Ti?The specifications of the GTX 780 Ti are quite impressive, especially compared to the GTX 780 as it has 25% more cores and faster memory.  GPU Boost 2.0 has been tweaked and the power delivery to the card has been balanced.  Along with great features like ShadowPlay and the GeForce experience, Nvidia believes that they not only have the fastest GPU but the most refined, and with the best experience for the gamer.

Specifications:

GeForce GTX 780 Ti ships with 2880 CUDA Cores and 15 SMX units. The memory subsystem of GeForce GTX 780 Ti consists of six 64-bit memory controllers (384-bit) with 3GB of GDDR5 memory.  The base clock speed of the GeForce GTX 780 Ti is 875MHz. The typical Boost Clock speed is 928MHz. The Boost Clock speed is based on the average GeForce GTX 780 Ti card running a wide variety of games and applications.  Note that the actual Boost clock will vary from game-to-game depending on actual system conditions.

The GeForce GTX 780 Ti’s memory speed is 7000MHz data rate, an upgrade over the Titan’s and the GTX 780’s 6000MHz rated GDDR5.
The GeForce GTX 780 Ti reference board measures 10.5” in length. Display outputs include two dual-link DVIs, one HDMI and one DisplayPort connector. One 8-pin PCIe power connector and one 6-pin PCIe power connector are required for operation.

How does the GK110 GTX 780 Ti compare with the Hawaii 290X die?

Nvidia believes that their larger die than the AMD Hawaii die gives them an automatic advantage.  We have observed that the Quiet mode of the R9 290X exhibits a lot of variability in actually playing games due to thermal throttling because it runs hot and quickly throttles performance beginning at 94C with the fan at the default 40%.Nvidia is quick to point out their their competitor does not offer a guaranteed minimum clock rate – but only a maximum boost rate of 1000MHz.  Here Nvidia has charted Crysis 3 over time to show the differences between playing on a R9 290X in Quiet mode versus playing with a GTX 780 Ti.Although we did not see quite the extreme differences with the PowerColor 290X OC, we did note thermal throttling in Quiet mode.  Uber mode allows the fan to ramp up to a noisy 55% which kept the GPU below 94C in our relatively cool ambient Fall temperatures (72-75F).

With the same TDP of 250W as Titan, it is clear that the GTX 780 Ti GK110 GPU is built for higher frequencies and it should overclock at least as well as the Titan does. We have been benching and playing games with the GTX 780 Ti for nearly a week under NDA and it has been an exceptional experience that we would like to share with you.

Here is our testbed of competing cards and we shall test 30 games and 4 synthetics using Core i7-3770K at 4.5GHz, EVGA’s Z77 FTW motherboard and 16GB of Kingston “Beast” 2133MHz HyperX DDR3:

• GTX 780 Ti – $699 -(Nvidia’s brand-new mainstream GK110 single-GPU Kepler flagship)
• GTX 780 Ti Overclock – $699 (our own OC of +175/+400MHz)
• GTX 780 – $499, formerly $649 – (EVGA’s reference GTX 780)
• GTX 780 Overclock – $499 – (EVGA’s reference GTX 780 +150MHz/+550MHz)
  
• GTX Titan – $1000 – (GK110 current special purpose Kepler – gaming multi-display/compute)
• GTX 690 – $1000 – (GK114 – current dual-GPU Kepler flagship)
• GTX 770 – $329, formerly $399 – (GK114 – now being replaced, single-GPU and formerly the Kepler flagship)
• PowerColor R9 290X OC BF4 Edition Uber Mode – $579 – (Hawaii – OC +30MHz)
• R9 280X – $299 – (VisionTek’s card at reference speeds)
• HD 7970 GHz Edition (Tahiti – former AMD single GPU flagship, now EoL)
• HD 7970 (Tahiti – mainstream original AMD single-GPU flagship, Now EoL)

This evaluation will pit the stock and overclocked GTX 780 Ti, against the reference and overclocked 780 as well as the GeForce Titan, GTX 690, GTX 770, against our PowerColor reference design HD 7970 at stock and at GHz edition at locked-on boost speeds (1050MHz), as well as the VisionTek R9 280X, and of course the PowerColor R9290X OC in Uber mode, using 30 modern games and 4 synthetic benchmarks at 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 resolutions.

We will also look very closely at the just-released Batman: Arkham Origins to compare PhysX ‘on’ versus ‘off’. In an upcoming evaluation focusing on PowerColor 290X overclocking, we shall then compare Nvidia’s 3-panel Surround working off of a single card at 5760×1080 resolution and higher to see if the GTX 780 Ti’s 3GB framebuffer has any disadvantage compared to Titan’s 6GB and R9 290X’ 4GB.

New Software – Shadowplay and GeForce Experience

New software was launched with the original GTX 780. Today, the GeForce Experience (GFE) has matured to cover over 100 games and it has become a regular feature for Nvidia gamers. No longer does one have to (although some of us love to) fiddle with settings to find the best combination for our particular hardware.

Just one optimize button customizes the settings for a “best playable experience”Shadowplay is 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 is available to Kepler owners and we will bring you our experiences with it compared to AMD’s Gaming Evolved app in an upcoming evaluation.  Nvidia also offers the upcoming “G-Sync” which promises to revolutionize gaming by syncing the display to a Kepler Nvidia GPU.

How does the GTX 780 Ti compare with its rival, AMD’s top single GPU R9 290X and is it worth $150 more?

Here is the big question: How does the GTX 780 Ti at $699 compare with the R9 290X at $549-$579, the original GTX 780 at $500, and with Titan at $1000? Of course, Titan is a special-purpose halo card that is not only equipped with 6GB of very expensive Samsung GDDR5 for multi-display, it also comes equipped with Dual-precision enabled for compute and CUDA programming, and it commands a price premium.  It is neither EoL’ed nor will its price be adjusted by Nvidia.

First, let’s take a closer look at the new GTX 780 Ti.