The GTX 780 arrives – 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 and graphs to make comparisons easy, as well as dividing games up into easy-to-read charts by their DX pathway and by resolution.

Here is the main summary chart:

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.  Looking at all of the benchmarks, overall the GTX 780 is just under 28% faster than the HD 7970 and slightly more than 30% faster than the GTX 680!  The lead increases by a couple of percentage points at 1920×1080 but drops by the same amount at 2560×1600.

[**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 the charts up a bit.  First up, lets compare the GTX 780 to the GTX Titan and to the GTX 690:

In every single case, our overclocked GTX 780 is faster than the stock GeForce Titan.

Now let’s see the GTX 780 compared with the GTX 680 and with the Fermi GF110 GTX 580 and the GTX 590 dual-GPU flagship of the last generation

It is interesting to see the GTX 580 compared with the GTX 780 as there is about that 70% improvement that Nvidia claims.  And the GTX 780 is clearly faster than the dual-GPU GTX 590.  We even see nearly a 30% improvement over the GTX 680!

Finally, let’s see the GTX 780 compared with AMD’s fastest single GPU cards:

The GTX 780 just runs away from the HD 7970 GE.  Looking at all of the benchmarks, overall the GTX 780 is approximately 29% faster than the HD 7970 and about 30% faster than the GTX 680!  There is very little difference between the synthetics and the gaming, although the synthetic tests slightly favor the GTX 780 a bit more than in the gaming tests.

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.  There is approximately a +30% performance advantage of the GTX 780 in the synthetic tests over the GTX 680 or the HD 7970.

Synthetic tests are interesting but they are not necessarily indicative of real world gaming performance. In all three cases, the GTX780 “wins” over everything else except the GTX 690 and the Titan by a large margin. Next up, let’s look at DX9 games.

DX9/DX10 Games

We test fairly demanding DX9 games, Serious Sam 3, BFE and Alan Wake, with both 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 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.

[**BattleForge had flashing textures with the HD 7970 that was not present in the other cards, including the HD 6990]

Now the newer DX11 games

 

Now let’s check out our newest DX11 games

Here are our newest DX11 games at 2560×1600.

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

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 with our GTX 780, GTX Titan and our GTX 690.  We also bench with and without 2xSSAA.

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.

Overclocking

We overclocked our GTX 780 +150MHz on the core and +550MHz on the memory. This is a good overclock on stock voltage, stock thermal, and stock fan profile, and it matches the overclock we got with our GTX 690 of +150/550MHz and it is +20MHz higher than we got with the Titan

From our charts, we can see that the GTX 780 scales extremely well at 2560×1600 but not as well at 1920×1080. Our CPU at 4.5GHz simply needs to be clocked higher at this resolution.

No matter how you add it up, the GTX 780 is generally faster than any other video card except for the Titan and the dual-GPU GTX 690. It also overclocks very well with the stock voltage and fan profile. AMD would have to respin and significantly increase the clocks of the HD 7970 to catch the GTX 780 and we expect that it would use a lot more power and be relatively noisy and difficult to cool.

Let’s head for our conclusion.

«1. GTX 780 Arrives!2. Architecture recap & specifications3. A Look at the GTX 7804. Test Configuration5. Overclocking the GTX 7806. Performance Summary Charts7. The Conclusion8. View All»