NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti : Colossal power

NVIDIA announced its flagship single GPU card at an event in Montreal last month but at that time there were no details out on the technical specifications. Prima facie, it looked like NVIDIA’s response to AMD’s flagship - the R9 290X. NVIDIA had announced the GTX Titan based on the GK110 GPU which had one streaming multiprocessor unit (SMX) disabled. With the GTX 780Ti, you get everything enabled. Design and Build

The GTX 780Ti looks like a clone of the GTX Titan and the GTX 780

The card looks like a clone of the GTX 780 and the GTX Titan. NVIDIA, it seems, is following the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ philosophy for their high end cards specially where design is concerned. So you have the same transparent cover over the vapour chamber and the brushed-aluminium topped heat blower-style fan.  The cooler is completely sealed off, so the fan sucks in cool air from the front and expels it directly outside your chassis. The premium look is intact. On the rear side the circuit is not shielded though.

The GTX 780Ti sports the same aluminium topped blower that was seen on the Titan and GTX 780

On the connectivity front, you have two DVI ports, an HDMI port and a DisplayPort. It has a six-pin and an eight-pin power connector on the top right hand side. On the top left hand side you have two SLI ports, which allows you to have a multi-GPU setup. Features

A single six-pin and eight-pin power connector

    The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti is based on the GK110 GPU, but unlike the GTX 780 or the GTX Titan, the 780Ti has all 15 of the SMX units activated. As a result, it has 2880 CUDA cores which is 192 more than that seen on the GTX Titan as it has 14 SMXes activated (192 cores per SMX unit). Also there are 240 texture units on the GTX 780Ti as compared to 224 found on the GTX Titan. It has a clock speed of 875MHz with a Boost clock of 928MHz and just like the GTX 770, it features a memory clock of 7GHz. Transistor count is the same as the GTX 780 and the GTX Titan at 7.1 billion, but it has 3GB of GDDR5 memory. The chart below gives a specs comparison between the GTX 780Ti, GTX Titan and GTX 780.

Test Setup Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K Motherboard: ASRock Z87M Extreme4 RAM: 2 x 4GB GSkill RipjawsX OS Drive: Plextor SSD, 256GB (boot drive) Source Drive: WD Velociraptor, 150GB (secondary drive) PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Catalyst Driver version: 13.11 Beta Nvidia driver version: 331.82 Performance 3DMark 11 3DMark is a computer benchmarking tool created and developed by Futuremark Corporation to determine the performance of a computer’s 3D graphic rendering and CPU workload processing capabilities. The latest version makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11, including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. We used the “Performance” preset for this benchmark.

Unigine Heaven 4.0 Unigine Heaven 4.0 is a DirectX 11 benchmark based on the Unigine engine which can be used to test the stability of a GPU under stressful conditions. It involves a run-through of an imaginary land involving floating islands, cobblestoned streets, smokey atmosphere, going through caves lit with burning fires, dragon statues and so on. You can adjust the tessellation, anti-aliasing filters, anisotropic filters etc. We run this test keeping the settings at Ultra, 8x Anti-asliasing filter and Tessellation at Extreme.

Battlefield 3 Battlefield 3 is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE and is based on the new Frostbite 2 game engine. The game only supports DX10 and DX11, which enables enhanced in-game destruction with Destruction 3.0, creating more refined physics than its predecessor and quasi-realtime radiosity using Geometrics’ Enlighten technology. The game is a visual treat and a nightmare for graphics cards, which makes it perfect for our test. We used the “Ultra High” preset, Post AA – High, Blur – Full, Field of View – 90, Level – “Fear no Evil”.

Crysis 2 Crysis 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Crytek and is based on the new CryEngine 3. Just like the first iteration of the game, Crysis 2 continues to be one of the best-looking shooters to date. The settings used for this benchmark were “Ultra and High” preset in Adrenalin, DX11 and High-resolution texture patch.

Dirt 3   Dirt 3 is a rallying video game and the third in the Dirt series of the Colin McRae Rally series, developed and published by Codemasters. The game is extremely scalable and features DX11 tessellation effects. We used the built-in benchmark tool, along with “Ultra” quality preset.

Metro: Last Light Metro: Last Light is a first-person shooter video game that continues Metro’s legacy of being one of the most demanding games for the best of GPUs. The game has a lot of DX11 eye-candy, which really puts a strain on any GPU. All DX11 features were enabled for the benchmark and we used the built-in benchmark for this test.

  Multi-monitor test We ran all our games on maxed out settings, on a three-monitor setup to get a resolution of 5760x1080 and tested the GTX 780Ti against the GTX Titan.

  Temperatures We noted the temperature of all the participating cards at idle and load states. The fan speeds were kept on auto. We noted maximum load temperatures after running benchmarks such as 3D Mark 11, Unigine Heaven 4.0, Battlefield 3 and Metro: Last Light and taking an average.

  Verdict and Price in India The NVIDIA GTX 780Ti, is by far, the fastest graphics card we have tested. Unfortunately, we could not get our hands on the R9 290X in time to compare it with the GTX 780Ti, as both cards were launched around the same time and positioned as their companies’ flagship products. So the Best Performer award shall be held back till we do a full review of the AMD R9 290X, which we will be getting soon.   The price point of the 780Ti at Rs 59,000 is on the higher side, but it is clearly meant for niche gamers. In terms of performance as you may have noticed from the charts - it aces all the benchmarks. It is around 7 to 8 per cent faster than the GTX Titan and around Rs 10,000 cheaper. Unfortunately NVIDIA didn’t have a GTX 780 at the time of reviewing the 780Ti, so we cannot give the performance improvement in terms of percentage. The GTX 780 still sells around Rs 49,000. Considering NVIDIA has announced price drops for GTX 780 globally - although the Indian market is yet to see it in action - it would have been interesting to note how much of value addition that would be.   But at the moment, the GTX 780Ti is the card to beat.