When Nvidia launched the GTX 780 it was an extremely impressive card, and frankly it still is. Even so AMD did come out swinging with the new R9 290X and to counter that Nvidia lowered the pricing of the GTX 780 and GTX 770. Now to go along with that they are filling in the price gap they created with the lower prices with a new product, the GTX 780 Ti. Today I have the chance to check out the GTX 780 Ti and see what it is all about. I expected the GTX 780 Ti to just be a higher clocked GTX 780, but I was pleasantly surprised, read on to find out what’s different.

Product Name: Nvidia GTX 780 Ti

Review Sample Provided by: Nvidia

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

 

 

GTX 780 Ti Details

Like I said before, when I heard that Nvidia was bringing out the GTX 780 Ti my first thought was that this would just be a faster clock speed version of the GTX 780. Of course we can’t go on assumptions, so let’s see the specifications. To make it easier I put them next to the GTX 780 and the Titan for comparison.

 

GTX 780

Titan

GTX 780 Ti

MSRP

$499

$999

$699

CUDA Cores

2304

2688

2880

Base Clock

863 MHz

837 MHz

875 MHz

Boost Clock

900 MHz

876 MHz

928 MHz

Memory Config

3GB/384-bit GDDR5

6GB/384-bit GDDR5

3GB/384-bit GDDR5

Memory Speed

6.0 Gbps

6.0 Gbps

7.0 Gbps

Power Connectors

6-pin + 8-pin

6-pin + 8-pin

6-pin + 8-pin

TDP

250W

250W

250W

Outputs

2x DL-DVI

HDMI

DisplayPort 1.2

2x DL-DVI

HDMI

DisplayPort 1.2

2x DL-DVI

HDMI

Displayport 1.2

Bus Interface

PCI Express 3.0

PCI Express 3.0

PCI Express 3.0

As you can see, there is a little more to the GTX 780 Ti than just a clock boost. In fact it out does the Titan in nearly every way other than memory buffer size when you go just by the specifications listed here. So we have 576 more CUDA cores over the GTX 780, 7 Gbps memory over 6 Gbps memory and even a nice clock speed boost over the other cards. So this left me wondering where this leaves the Titan in Nvidia’s product lineup, will it stick around? The answer to that is yes they are keeping the Titan in their lineup but its focus will stay on applications that need the compute performance that the Titans double-precision FPU provides. Both the GTX 780 and GTX 780 Ti lack that double-precision performance so until they introduce a card to replace the Titan it will still be an important part of their lineup.

The price point reduction of the GTX 780 and GTX 770 down to $499 and $329 helped improve their value against the competition that AMD has introduced with their new line of cards. The GTX 780 Ti has an MSRP of $699 at launch putting it in a higher price bracket than the recently launched R9 290X with tis price of $549. With the higher price, you are getting a higher number of stream processors, a higher base clock, and a memory clock that is considerably higher as well. I think the all metal fan shroud design adds a little bit of value to things as well, unless you plan on water cooling anyhow.

The one area that you might not consider to look at is the power usage between the GTX 780 Ti and the 290X. The 290X has a power rating of close to 300 watts where the GTX 780 Ti pulls up to 250 watts. This makes a difference when it comes to thermal and noise performance as well as your overall power usage as well. This is especially important when it comes to multi card configurations where maximum power draw, noise, and cooling can all be issues you have to work around.

image 1

image 5

Nvidia is also doing a bundle with their GTX 780 Ti, GTX 780, and GTX 770 that will get you Arkham Origins, Splinter Cell: Blacklist and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, plus $100 off a SHIELD purchase. This is called their “The Way It’s Meant to Be Played Holiday Bundle with SHIELD”. They are also hooking people up who pick up the GTX 760 and GTX 660 as well with Splinter Cell: Blacklist and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, plus $50 off a SHIELD purchase. I can’t express how much I love all of the bundles that Nvidia and AMD have been putting together. There is nothing better than getting a few new games to play on your new video card and they also add a lot of value to your purchase as well. This is especially true if you are interested in picking up an Nvidia Shield as well. To put it this way, I have seriously been considering selling off my current cards in my personal PC and picking up a few GTX 780’s or similar along with a Shield.

Before we jump into the other sections, I wanted to mention a couple of the features that Nvidia has been working on. These are a big reason for my interest in getting more Kepler into my life. First I love the interface and the improvements that have been introducing into the “GeForce Experience”. For the first time ever keeping your video card drivers up to date requires very little work on your part and I will tell you that keeping my video card drivers up to date isn’t one of my favorite uses of my time, so I welcome it. Additionally for those of you who are a little less worried about tweaking things and you just want things to work, they have been doing a great just with their game setting optimizations as well, you can press a button and it will get you the best performance/graphics ratio possible without having to toy with the settings in game.

Another Nvidia exclusive feature that I can’t talk enough about was the recently introduced ShadowPlay feature. Nvidia utilizes the H. 264 video encoder build into ever Kepler GPU to seamlessly record your last 10-20 minutes of gameplay footage in 1080p at 60FPS like a DVR and if something amazing happens in game you can press a button and it will save that video file for you to show off on youtube, reddit, and to your friends later. You can also use this to record like normal as well without having to worry about it causing slowdowns in game like running FRAPS for example. The last feature that I’m excited about is Nvidia’s G-Sync that (once displays are available) will synchronize your video card to your monitor to eliminate screen tearing, stuttering, and input lag.

 


Card Layout and Photos

With the GTX 780 Ti you are getting basically the same cooling design as we saw with the GTX 770 to the Titan. The all metal design was very impressive to me when I first saw it and even months later It still catches my eye every time I find a reason to get my hands on one here in the office. You get the same green GeForce GTX logo on the top of the card that lights up and you also have the window on the side that gives a little style while also letting you peak in and see if you have any dust buildup. I really have no idea how Nvidia is going to improve on this design with future models.

image 6

image 7

image 8

image 9

I know it’s a small change but filling in the name that is molded into the metal fan shroud was a nice touch. It really brings your attention to the card name, before you have to look fairly close to see if someone was running a GTX 770 or a Titan. When you are putting this amount of money down for a card, a lot of people are going to want people to know what they have inside!

image 10

The other exterior change for the GTX 780 Ti was behind the side window. To go along with the black lettering they anodized the cooling fins in black as well. These aren’t huge changes, but they are small touches that do give the card a little more styling without losing what made the GTX 770, GTX 780, and Titan great looking cards.

image 11

The blower fan on the Ti is the same as we have seen on the previous cards with this same cooling design. For those of you who haven’t seen them before, it is a fairly typical reference fan design that pushes air towards the sides where a lot of aftermarket cooling designs push air down and are thinner. I love the design around the fan where you get the black formed area with the machined lip just around the fan; all of this is of course made of metal just like the rest of the fan shroud. To match the fan to the rest of the design they have also machined a metal cap for the center of the fan that brings it all together.

image 12

There are only two areas for the air that the fan pushes to go, half goes towards the PCI slot where it will go over the heatsink that is behind the window and then out of the back of your computer, the other half goes over a smaller heatsink that is just between the fan and the end of the card and then into your case. This means the GTX 780 Ti will put a little heat into your case, but not nearly as much as an aftermarket cooler that will vent all of its warm air into the case.

image 2

The GTX 780 Ti shares the same connection configuration as almost every card on the market now. You get a full sized DisplayPort connection along with a full sized HDMI. Then at the bottom you have two DVI connections, with one having analog pass-through as well for those who still need to use a DVI to VGA adapter. Being a reference design, the card does fully use the PCI vents, so Nvidia made sure to slip vents in between the HDMI and DVI ports as well as the larger vent.

image 13

With the GTX 780 Ti having the same 250 watt power requirements as the GTX 780, it’s not a shock at all that they both have the same 8+6 pin power configuration. This leaves room for overclocked cards later to go with a 8+8 configuration as well if they need the additional power.

image 14

Much like the GTX 780 and the GTX 770 the GTX 780 Ti comes with two SLI connections. Unlike the GTX 780 though, you can run the GTX 780 Ti in Quad SLI. Before this was limited to just the Titan, but with this being the new gaming flagship, the GTX 780 Ti has the same ability if you have the money in your budget.

image 15

When you put the GTX 780 Ti next to the GTX 780 you can see the differences a little more clearly, especially the blacked out name badge and the black heatsink through the window. On the flip side of the cards we can finally see how much changed on the PCB. After taking a close look I can say without a doubt that the Ti does have a lot of differences from the GTX 780’s PCB. They do share a lot as well, but this isn’t just a different GPU tossed on the same PCB, this is a different card all together.

image 3

image 4

image 6

 


Our Test Rig and Procedures

Our Test Rig

CPU

Intel i7-3960X

Memory

Corsair Vengeance 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM Quad Channel  (4x4GB)

Motherboard

Asus Rampage IV X79 Motherboard 

Cooling

Intel Active Thermal Solution RTS2011LC

Power Supply

Cooler Master Gold Series 1200 Watt PSU

Storage

Kingston Hyper X 120 SSD

Seagate Constellation 2tb Hard drive 

Case

High Speed PC Test Bench

Our Testing Procedures

Bioshock Infinite

Using the Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool we run Bioshock Infinite on the “Xtreme” quality setting. This has a resolution of 1920x1080, FXAA turned on, Ultra Texture detail, 16x Aniso Texture Filtering, Ultra Dynamic Shadows, Normal Postprocessing, Light Shafts on, Ambient Occlusion set to ultra, and the Level of Detail set to Ultra as well.

Tomb Raider

Using the Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool we run Tomb Raider on the “Xtreme” quality setting. This has a resolution of 1920x1080, Exclusive Fullscreen turned on, Anti-Aliasing set to 2xSSAA, Texture Quality set to Ultra, Texture Aniso set to 16x Aniso, Hair Quality set to TressFX, Shadow set to Normal, Shadow Resolution on High, Ultra SSAO, Ultra Depth of Field, High Reflection quality, Ultra LOD scale, Post Processing On, High Precision RT turned on, and Tessellation is also turned on. 

Hitman: Absolution

Using the Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool we run Hitman: Absolution on the “Xtreme” quality setting other than the MSAA setting is turned down from 8x to 2x. That setting puts the resolution at 1920x1080, MSAA is set to 2x, Texture Quality is set to High, Texture Aniso is set to 16x, Shadows are on Ultra, SSA is set to high, Global Illumination is turned on, Reflections are set to High, FXAA is on, Level of Detail is set to Ultra, Depth of Field is high, Tessellation is turned on, and Bloom is set to normal.

Sleeping Dogs

Using the Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool we run Sleeping Dogs on the “Xtreme” quality setting. That means our resolution is set to 1920x1080, Anti-Aliasing is set to Extreme, Texture Quality is set to High-Res, Shadow Quality is High, Shadow Filter is set to high, SSAO is set to High, Motion Blur Level is set to High, and World Density is set to Extreme.

F1 2012

We use the built in benchmark for F1 2012. We set our resolution to 1920x1080 and then use the “Ultra” setting.

Batman Arkham Asylum

We used the built-in benchmark set to 1920 x 1080, Multi Sample AA 16XQ, Detail Level, Very High, Bloom: Yes, Dynamic Shadows: Yes, Motion Blur: Yes, Distortion: Yes, Fog Volumes: Yes, Spherical Harmonic Lighting: Yes, Ambient Occlusion: Yes, PhysX: Off

Total War: Shogun 2

Direct X11 Benchmark High setting

Crysis 2

Using Adrenaline Crysis 2 benchmark.  1080p, 4x Anti-Aliasing, DX11, Laplace Edge Detection Edge AA, on the Times Square map, with hi res textures turned on.

Battlefield 3

Using Fraps with the game set to Ultra settings with 4x MSAA Antialiasing Deferred, 16X Anisotropic Filter, at 1920x1080.

Sniper V2 Elite

1920 x 1080 resolution, graphics detail set to ultra

Dirt Showdown

1920 x 1080 resolution, 4x MSAA multisampling, Vsync off, Shadows: ultra; Post Process: High; Night Lighting: High; Vehicle Reflections: Ultra; Ambient Occlusion: Ultra; Water: high; Objects: Ultra; Trees: Ultra; Crowd: Ultra; Ground Cover: High.

Metro Last Light

Using the included benchmark tool. The settings are set to 1920x1080, DirectX 11, quality is set to very high, Texture filtering is untouched at 4x, and motion blue is set to normal. SSAA is unselected, PhysX is unselected, Tessellation is off. We run through scene D6 three times to get an average score.

Synthetic Benchmarks

For video cards our synthetic benchmarks are limited to 3DMark Vantage 2011, and 3DMark 2013 (AKA 3DMark). In 3DMark Vantage 2011 we run both performance and extreme benchmarks. The same goes for the most current version of 3DMark, we run through Fire Strike on standard and extreme settings.

Unreal Heaven Benchmark 4.0

Using the “Extreme” preset

Unreal Heaven Benchmark 4.0 heat testing

We run through Unreal Heaven at 1080p for 30 minutes to test in game heat performance and noise output of the card while under load.

Power Usage

Using Unreal Heaven Benchmark 4.0, we get our “load” power usage number from the peak power usage during our test. We get our numbers from a Kill-A-Watt connected to the test benches power cord.

Noise Testing

Our Noise testing is done using a decibel meter 3 inches away from the video card on the bottom/fan side of the card. We test an idle noise level and then to get an idea of how loud the card will get if it warms all the way up we also turn the fan speed up to 100% and test again. The 100% test isn’t a representation of typical in game noise levels, but it will show you how loud a card can be if you run it at its highest setting or if it gets very hot.

 

 


Cooler, Noise, and Power

With this being the third Nvidia card that I have had on the test bench with this same cooling design I did come into my testing with some expectations. But even so, with the changes in the design from the GTX 780 to the GTX 780 Ti I really wasn’t sure what that would mean for thermal performance as well as real world power usage. So I went through our standard benchmarks to see how the Ti would perform. I started with noise performance. Our testing captures the range of noise that you should expect with both idle and 100% fan speed noise levels. Not surprisingly (because the cooling design really hasn’t changed) both idle and 100% tests came out in line with both the GTX 780 and GTX 770 results. This put the GTX 780 Ti on the higher side of the middle of the pack. This wasn’t a bad result, but to be fair in all of my testing this is the only time the card ever ran at 100% fan load, you will rarely if ever have to worry about it.  

graph2

graph3

For thermal performance while running in the heaven benchmark the highest temperature that I saw the Ti hit was 83 degrees. This is more of a representation of what Nvidia sets their thermal goal at though. As you can see in the second photo, one of the settings you can adjust is your temperature target, setting it at the stock level will get you quiet gaming. You can turn it up to give the card more room to boost or turn it down if you are looking to keep your temperatures cooler.  

power target

graph4

When it came to power consumption, with this being the new flagship card I wasn’t surprised that it pulls more power than the last two GTX 780’s I have tested, including an overclocked card. At load the entire test bench pulled 491 watts, including its six core CPU, water cooling, and hard drive/SSD. At Idle though the numbers were more impressive coming in within two watts of the GTX 780’s previously tested. You won’t have to worry about your new build sucking down power when you aren’t in game.

graph20

 


Synthetic Benchmarks

To start off my performance testing I went through our synthetic benchmark suite to get an idea of how the GTX 780 Ti performed. This includes two different 3DMark benchmarks and each in normal (performance) and extreme settings as well as a run through the Unreal Heaven 4.0 benchmark in the extreme setting. In all five of my tests the GTX 780 Ti out performed any and all single card results by a considerable amount. In fact in 3DMark Fire Strike I saw a 21.4% increase over the GTX 780 and 23% on the extreme setting. Improvements weren’t as high in the older 3DMark 11, but they were still respectable. Results were surprisingly close to SLI results from a pair of GTX 760’s in SLI as well.

graph6

graph7

graph14

graph1

graph5

 


In Game Benchmarks

Synthetic benchmarks are great, but most of us want a killer video card to be able to enjoy all of the latest games at the highest possible settings. So to see how the GTX 780 Ti performs in game I put it through 11 different benchmarks to get an idea of what to expect. Your results might very slightly depending on levels and especially when it comes to online play or situations In that that have more going on. But these are a good baseline to start with. Out of the 11 games I tested, every single game had an average FPS result of over 60 and in most cases the number was considerably higher. The Ti is the only card that I have tested to date to do this in every single test. This is especially impressive when you keep in mind that all of the tests are run at their highest settings with AA turned on. I can’t wait to put the GTX 780 Ti to the test in our upcoming 2560x1440 testing as well!  One thing is for sure, you aren’t going to find another single GPU card that will give you faster results across the board.

graph19

graph18

graph17

graph16

graph15

graph13

graph12

graph11

graph10

graph9

graph8

 


Overclocking

For overclocking I put the GTX 780 Ti through the same testing I use on every card. I run through GPU and then Memory overclocking individually and document the results I see then attempt to run them together. As you will see below, I started with stock clocks on the GPU and I saw 1020MHz from the GPU Boost 2.0, an impressive number in itself. From there I slowly bumped things up until 350Mhz offset where it finally failed. Knowing my limit I slowly worked my way back up to the highest clock I could run without crashing, 340Mhz offset for 1332Mhz clock speed. The end result gave me a whopping 26% increase in FPS in the test as well while overclocked.

In the image below you can see how as I bumped up our GPU clocks that I knew I was getting close to the limit when my clock speeds stopped being completely stable.

overclock

Memory testing was similar but quicker than with the GPU clock. I bumped things up from 0 up to 600Mhz where it failed then back to 550 for a pass result. Where things get a little interesting is when you look at my FPS results throughout my memory overclocking. As you can see beyond 200Mhz I really didn’t see any performance improvements and in some cases things slowed down. That was a little disappointing, even though we managed to push the GTX 780 Ti to very impressive 8100Mhz memory clock speed.

Putting my two overclocks together turned out to be the biggest challenge of all. At first everything I did would cause a hard crash and reboot before the benchmark would complete. It wasn’t until I turned the memory clock WAY down that I was finally able to get a pass result (there was one result before that passed but was 20 FPS lower that I would consider a fail). After that I bumped things up slowly with very little results. In the end I was able to pick from an impressive overclock on the GPU or the Memory, running them together proved to be too much. Even so, the performance improvements were impressive.

GPU Clock Speed Overclocking

GPU Clock Speed Offset

Pass/Fail

Resulting GPU Speed

FPS Result

Notes

0Mhz

Pass

1020Mhz

68.88

 

100Mhz

Pass

1111Mhz

74.37

 

150Mhz

Pass

1150Mhz

77.11

 

200Mhz

Pass

1189Mhz

79.89

 

250Mhz

Pass

1243Mhz

82.45

 

300Mhz

Pass

1293Mhz

84.99

 

350Mhz

Fail

N/A

N/A

Hard Crash

325Mhz

Pass

1318Mhz

86.14

 

335Mhz

Pass

1328Mhz

86.59

 

340Mhz

Pass

1332Mhz

86.79

 

345Mhz

Fail

N/A

N/A

Hard Crash

 

Memory Clock Offset Overclocking

Memory Clock Speed Offset

Pass/Fail

Resulting Memory Speed

FPS Result

Notes

0MHz

Pass

3499MHz

68.88

 

200MHz

Pass

3709MHz

69.62

 

300MHz

Pass

3802MHz

69.57

 

400MHZ

Pass

3899MHz

69.61

 

500MHZ

Pass

4001MHz

69.45

 

600MHz

Fail

N/A

N/A

Hard Crash

550MHz

Pass

4050MHz

69.63

 
 

Combined GPU and Memory overclocks together

GPU Offset

Memory Offset

Pass Fail

FPS Resuts

Notes

340Mhz

550Mhz

Fail

N/A

Hard Crash

335Mhz

550Mhz

Fail

N/A

Hard Crash

335Mhz

500Mhz

Fail

N/A

Hard Crash

330Mhz

500Mhz

Fail

N/A

Hard Crash

330Mhz

450Mhz

Pass

68.91

 

340Mhz

200Mhz

Pass

87.05

 

340Mhz

300Mhz

Pass

87.09

 

340MHz

400MHz

Fail

N/A

Hard Crash

               

 


Overall and Final Verdict

So after going over all of the details about the GTX 780 Ti and then putting it through our test suite, what do I think of the card? First things first, this is the fastest single card I have ever tested. It really is a monster of a card. As with the GTX 780 and the GTX 770 I was also impressed with the overall build quality and the logo on the top that glows. Nvidia really didn’t change much on the exterior of the card over the Titan, GTX 780, and GTX 770 other than the black touches in the molded in name badge and the black anodized heatsinks, but the small touches do add to the look. 

When it came time to overclock the GTX 780 Ti I was extremely impressed with what I was able to do on the GPU clocks as well as with its memory. In the end I was able to push the memory up to 8100Mhz, a very impressive number in itself. I was a little disappointed though when I struggled to get both overclocks to work together.

The biggest debate I had with the GTX 780 Ti though was with its price. When you considering AMD’s R9 290X is considerably lower it might be a hard sell. But if you keep in mind that you are getting a substantial improvement over the GTX 780 that was up until recently priced at $649 it’s easy to see how they justified the price. Not only that but in gaming performance the Ti will best the Titan as well and it has been a fairly popular card at a whopping $999. In the end I would say that at just under $700 the GTX 780 Ti is priced out of a lot of folk’s budgets, but if that isn’t a concern you are still getting top level performance for your money. Nvidia is helping the situation a lot with their “The Way It’s Meant to Be Played Holiday Bundle with SHIELD” that gives you three new AA titles and $100 off the Shield as well.

Lastly, I mentioned it before, but it’s worth pointing out again that Nvidia has made huge improvements on the software side of things as well. Not only do they have great integration with their Shield handheld console, but things like Shadowplay where they take advantage of the H. 264 video encoder build into ever Kepler GPU to seamlessly record your last 10-20 minutes of gameplay footage like a DVR. Their GeForce Experience is quickly becoming an experience that most gamers aren’t going to want to miss out on. 

fv3tophonors

Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

Log in to comment

garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #33261 07 Nov 2013 14:01
Today we break things up a little with the launch of Nvidia's response to the R9 290X.

We have 1045 guests and no members online

supportus