I feel like an idiot buying a 660Ti two months ago for $300. At least I got the 3GB version that'll be "somewhat" future-proof for BF4 as the maps are expected to tax 2GB cards.
Don't look back. You can only make your decision based on the information you had and your needs at the time. If you could look just 2 minutes ahead, you would be a billionaire now and wouldn't be participating in this conversation.
this is essentially a cheaper 670.. coming it at or below the price of the 660TI. I don't see your purchase as being one of those you think $*!@! over. Hah. Your card is a bit slower but not noticeably so and the added ram may benefit you down the road.
I'd agree.. although pricing here is 275-300.. Don't see any at 249. The 7950 is 300.. They will have to lower that down a tiny bit to be competitive I think, take a small hit in performance (but more ram possible benefit later?) and their games bundle the trade off for consumers should be about equal.
No, they have warehouses in Canada; if you've ever ordered a big order you'd realize this since not everything ships at once; comes from different warehouses in Vancouver, Mississauga and several others. They charge us more because they can, but only charge more on certain items so that we can't revolt. Generally the can prices are very close to the US ones, but the odd time they are significantly more. Processing and taxes are also cheaper in the US, but we do get the crappy end of the stick at times. There was a specialty motherboard, on newegg.com this was 100, and newegg.ca this was 150; can't remember the model.
Looks like the GPU gains over a two year cycle is more than CPU gains Spending on GPU's is more worth while than Spending on CPU's Specially if you start from Sandy Bridge in CPU's
3D Rendering is a trivially parallelizable workload. As a result it can roughly double in performance with each full node process shrink just by keeping the core design the same but putting twice as many of them on the die. Real world behavior differs mostly in that some of the additional die space is used to enable things that weren't practical before instead of just making all the existing features twice as fast.
That is only strictly true if you are willing to use twice as much electricity and generate/remove twice as much heat (it could approach costing twice as much as well, but not nearly as often). A good chunk of each update needs to go to making the GPU have a higher TFLOP/W or the thing will melt.
luckily many of those issues are mitigated by transition to a smaller process node, as DanNeeley said. your statement is more applicable to dual die cards, not new processors having twice the functional units.
That is unfortunately no longer true, smaller processes do not benefit from the so-called 'Dennard scaling' anymore, without a lot of trickery from semiconductor engineers.
They may have to work harder at it; but as long as they're able to continue doing what you refer to as trickery, the result for us end users is the same.
CPU gains have been made, just not in performance. We don't need performance on the CPU side for a LOT of applications. Like I always say, if you had double the CPU performance, you still wouldn't gain much FPS in most games.
Intel would be cannibalizing it's higher end processors if it kept making CPU gains. Instead, it focuses on power consumption, to fit better CPUs into smaller things such as notebooks, tablets, etc. Look at the Macbook Air Review and then tell me we haven't made CPU gains.
More worthwhile than what? What are you even talking about? Today's i5 chips arnt the bottleneck to any of the GPUs here in any game. So what you're saying is irrelevant.
Aint that the truth, the biggest change was from the 500 series to the 600 series. The 600 series make most radeons look like dinosaurs or AMD processors. Intel is dicking around giving us less than 10% speed inprovement in each generation. Can't wait for AMD to release their steamroller 8 core, except where latency is crucial it will match haswell and cost a fraction. Haswell will still technically be faster, but only in benchmarks, in practice they will be identical. The change from piledriver to steamroller is like from a a pentium 4 to a core 2 duo. It's not a new architecture, but has so many improvements that it ought to be called one.
I checked all the games, and the first 4-5 games the 7950 Boost wins, the other the GTX 760 wins. I didn't add up the numbers, but are you guys sure the HD 7950 Boost is 8% slower overall?
And what's anandtech's stance on frametimes/fcat? Are those only used when problems arise, new games? I realize they take a lot of time, but I think they can be quite valuable in determing which card is the fastest.
Going by my chart, I have the GTX 760 winning in 7 of 10 games (all but DiRT, Hitman, and Crysis 1) at our highest 1080p quality settings, which is where I'm focusing on for a card this expensive. Of those magnitude matters; most of those GTX 760 wins are in the double digits, so the average does indeed end up being 8%
As for frametimes, the idea is that we would normally include them. That said this review left us crunched for time; I would have likely needed to drop the Fermi cards to make time. With that in mind, there's absolutely nothing interesting going on with single-GPU frametimes right now with the games we use. The only place NVIDIA still differ are under multi-GPU scenarios.
median, mean and mode all show very different things. you should have all three to draw detailed conclusions, however if only one is available i would personally prefer it be the mean.
With a sample size of 10, the median would not be a very helpful information. To be honest, the mean is not all the important either. The distribution of performances is not all that random when comparing nVidia and AMD, but rather there are significant preferences for one architecture by each game.
So everybody on the lookout for a new card should mainly be checking for a benchmark specifically on the game he/she spends the most time with. For this reason, I would love to see the benchmarks on Anandtech include the name of the engine for each game (if it is a licensed one), and maybe provide some handy reference to figure out what other games use the same reference.
And personally, as a player who does not play reaction-based games like shooters or racers a lot, I would love AT to re-introduce a BioWare and/or Blizzard title back into their benchmark-zoo. Even if those are not extremely new or demanding, I think they still have a high importance for a large number of players who don't care much to shoot virtual people in their virtual faces.
I see, I counted Sleeping Dogs as a win for the HD 7950 as well, considering the minimum fps is a bit higher. Thanks for the reply, I agree that if all is well with frametimes in a certain game, fraps is still a good way to measure raw rendering power.
Most multi-GPU users are reporting that the frame time issue mostly exists for 2-way SLI and Quad SLI. It seems that 3-way SLI or Dual GPU single slot SLI is the way to go for gamers concerned about the stutters. I'm not sure about 4-way SLI though, since I don't bother with it anymore. I can however, confirm that in my personal experience a single GPU or 3-way SLI is mostly unaffected.
I'm tempted to upgrade to it from my 560 when I built a Haswell box later this summer and put the difference between it and a higher end card toward a better SSD, etc and then get a top end Maxwell based card next year.
I'm a bit concerned about ending up in the same trap I did last time though. I bought the 560 as a stopgap replacement in Jan 2012 after stupidity killed my 5870, with the intent of upgrading to a GK100 based card in half a year or so only to have nVidia fumble its top end launch.
Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to driver games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2013. I think you meant "drive" not "driver"
Sad day in the GPU industry when a part that's ~75% of the *SECOND* tier ASIC and sells for $250 can be considered "Enthusiast".
It looks like Nvidia's marketing push to carve out ultra and uber enthusiast markets has worked, on the media anyways. Parts in this range used to be referred to as mainstream/midrange performance or gamer cards in the past, never once referred to as "Enthusiast".
Honestly if this $250 part is "Enthusiast" what are the $400 770, the $650 780, the $1000 Titan??? I guess we need to cough up $250 more for each Uber we place in front of Enthusiast; maybe at some point we just find new words and categories when one has been devalued and depreciated to the point it no longer holds any meaning.
Aside from the rant, the part's price and performance looks good. It's pretty clear at this point Kepler benefits more right now from the ROPs and bandwidth than SP and TMU. May change with future shader intensive titles, but the 760 pretty much confirms the 660Ti (and virtually any 30%+ bandwidth-neutered parts) was a big mistake.
who cares what ASIC it comes from, its irrelevant. Its a $250 gpu that performs as well or better than more expensive cards. Thats not mainstream, its enthusiast. Everything above it is enthusiast. The absolutely biggest amount of gpu sales come from those south of $200, so thats what most people consider mainstream.
People who don't enjoy getting less for the same price care what ASIC it comes from. I guess you don't mind getting smaller and smaller burgers, or less and less ounces in the food you buy at the grocery each year?
There is nothing enthusiast about this product, it's mainstream performance in the same price and market bracket that litters all of Nvidia's previous marketing slides in this $200-$300 range. Was the 8800GT an enthusiast card? No. Was the 560Ti an enthusiast card? No. Yet they both satisfy the criteria you set forth.
I was just thinking about this after reading the review over at Tom's (they refer to the 760 as mainstream). It's an interesting sociological exercise, how different people view the term enthusiast. Given the massive stratification at the high end--I mean, Titan, ffs--what is the cutoff for being an "enthusiast" card? Why even bother with hyperbolic modifiers when nobody who spends even $400 on a GPU would do so without knowing the difference between a 770, a 780, and a Titan, not to mention the 7970 [GHz edition], 7950 [Boost], etc.?
Personally, I'm inclined to agree with Ryan here. This is still a heckuva lot more graphics horsepower than, say, certain yet-to-be-released consoles, which I would argue define a "mainstream" baseline. Though if you're just commenting on how much the lowest common denominator in graphics performance has fallen, then that may be a sad day for the GPU industry, but it's a good day for consumers, who are able to get way more GPU for much less money than a couple years ago.
Sorry but getting "way more GPU for much less money than a couple years ago" is just progress and should be expected.
The context for how different people view the term enthusiast should be consistent, based on historical price and performance categories as well as physical and marketing segmentation factors. All of which indicate this is NOT an enthusiast part. Nvidia has clearly defined this in the past, and the enthusiast market did not start until $350+.
Some may say, "who cares", I guess people who actually shop in this $350+ market care, because calling a $250 part sets a terrible precedent, same as selling a tier-2 midrange ASIC like GK104 at $500 sets a terrible precedent. Why? Because if Nvidia is selling their 2nd fastest ASIC at "Enthusiast" price ranges starting at $250 all the way to $500, that gives them license to sell their actual Enthusiast parts at much more than $500.
Is it any surprise that we now have $650 GTX 780 and $1000 GTX Titan and GTX 690? Of course not. Why? Because people are doing cartwheels in the streets over the privilege of buying a stripped down, overclocked 2nd-tier ASIC for $250, because it's the new enthusiast part!
I put the $1000 Tital as 'Rich retard soon parts with his money.' Also, shut the fuck up elitest dumbfuck. Anyone willing to spend $200+ on a GPU is an enthusiast and is looking for more than just enough.
Yes just like the guy who rices up his Civic is now driving a "luxury sports car". Just another idiot that doesn't understand I'm actually advocating against elitest pricing and marketing brackets, move along if you don't understand the concepts and repercussions.
AMD is now saying the Never Settle Reloaded bundle is running out at retailers. That means, you should be mentioning that it isn't going to last much longer and doesn't really factor into the value of the 7950/7950B unless they decide to renew it.
Too big: there will loads of custom coolers, just like on the current cards. Shorter ones as well.
barely better than 660 ti at higher power consumption: the additional performance is approximately proportional to the added power draw, so efficiency hardly suffers. Of course I'll stick with my OC'ed 660Ti, but this newcomer is just more balanced for everything but the most pure compute tasks.
What's the point: cheaper for nVidia to produce (one SMX less) and sold cheaper. It's a win-win.
I suppose this is of little interest to most readers, but since your doing computer performance, how about a bitcoin GH performance chart. Video cards are actually of waning value in the bitcoin arms race but it's an interesting aspect of compute performance nonetheless and the high end AMD cards certainly still produce value.
Well it's hotter, more power hungry and louder than the GTX 670 while still being slower, which is kind of disappointing for something that's supposed to be an evolution of the GTX 600 series. Still, it does feel like "GTX 660 Done Right" in some ways, as that card was always too slow, forcing people to pay $400 for the GTX 670.
It's sad that prices have been creeping up so much without people noticing. $499 used to be the "ultra-enthusiast" segment, and $199 would buy you a very decent card. In 2012 and early 2013, $400 was the "mid-range" and $999 the "ultra high-end". GTX 760 brings the mid-range back to $250 again, at least until the GTX 860 come out at $499...
I just feel someone over @AMD is crazy and didn't think thru end users' point of view. With the release of Haswell, many will be putting together new boxes and the "new" GPU they'll get will be gtx760/770/780. AMD losing fans and revenue... *sigh*
I'm not sure I follow. Haswell doesn't appear to have amazed that many people - you could get away with an SB or IB build which overclock enough to make up the performance difference. If you already have one of those, with proper cooling you don't need to save money for a marginally better CPU - spend it on graphics instead.
It's not the SB/IB people upgrading; it's those of us with first generation i5/i7 systems or even older core 2 quads pulling the trigger now. AMD is out of the race except at the bottom and it's probably going to be two more years before Intel offers anything else worth mentioning on the desktop. (No socketed Broadwell chips, and assuming IVB-e and Haswell-e are as underwhelming at the $3xx pricepoint as SB-e is.)
I wished it included a benchmark with Skyrim on 2560x1440, with the hardcore texture mods on, AA/AS on pretty high with Ultra. Debating between this ($250), 7970... ($310!!!), 770 ($400)
You request will be taken under consideration, but I'll tell you right now that you shouldn't expect it to happen. One of the tenets of our testing methods is that we don't test with mods; they're often not optimized (or worse, optimized only for the developer's system) and frequently updated (making our benchmarks useless). Plus the number of users on any given mod is very low, which would mean our benchmarks wouldn't be very applicable to most of our readers.
Hopefully I will be building my first PC ever in a few weeks, I'm glad that Nvidia released the 760, since the 770 at $400+ is too expensive for me. My budget for my PC is $800-900. I was originally 90% sure I was gonna buy the GTX 760, $250 is a great price, but now since I've seen deals for the 7970 for as low as $300, I'm wondering is it worth it for pay a extra $50 for the 7970 (plus the 4 games). End question, what is a better value for the newb PC builder: a $250 GTX 760 or a $300 7970? Thanks!
I for one was not happy with the out come of the 760 tested . I wanted Nvidia to totally take the 670 and enhance it and make a 760..Do the same process like they did with the 680 to 770. I really wanted to buy this card... Waiting for this one and I'm pisssed.
Ryan, could you please elaborate why the 760 draws considerably more power than a 670 while still being slower? Is this because a lower clocked 670 is compared to a pretty high clocked 760 in comparison? What would the situation be if you compared a 760 to a 670 clock per clock? And would I be able to power this with a be quiet straight power e9 400w + 3770k folding 24/7 ? And last question, are your power consumption values measured from the socket with a watt meter or with ampere meter on each cable and then added up?
The biggest difference between the 760 and 670 is that the 760 has GPU Boost 2.0, which is a significantly different method of adjusting clockspeeds around temperature and power limits. The 670 had a TDP of 170W, but in practice its power target (a concept that doesn't exist with Boost 2.0) was below that. Whereas the GTX 760, if not constrained by temperatures, will get closer to its 170W TDP more frequently.
The other difference is as you note: clockspeeds. The GTX 760 has fewer SMXes, but it operates at a higher clockspeed and with higher voltages (1.2v vs. 1.175v). That really eats up power at the highest boost bins. The 760 is essentially a little less wide and a little deeper than 670; clock for clock the 670 is going to be faster (but it won't be able to clock quite as high).
As for your PSU question, I'm afraid I can't answer that in any confidence. Based on specs I'd think that would work, but I don't know anything about that PSU.
Finally, power consumption is measured at the wall.
Many non-reference GTX 670's boost higher, though. For example, my KFA² GTX 670 almost always boosts to 1,189 MHz, sometimes higher. If you can find a cheap, non-reference GTX 670 before they go out of stock, it might be a better deal.
The last 3 years we saw really no innovation in the desktop GPU market. If you bought a HD 5870, you can still rock that card today in every game without any issue. We will see most of today's card get tossed when 4k monitors become a reality. Even SLI/CF top end cards today will score sub 30fps when games are played natively at 4k res.
Ive been looking for the right price point to upgrade my GTX570, especially with BS4 coming out soon. I was hoping this would be it, but it looks like its really not enough of a jump to justify $250, especially when i could put that money towards a PS4 for some of the console games that wont be ported to PC. Any opinions otherwise?
I suppose it depends on what you want from an upgrade. Are you looking for at least a 2X speedup? If so then yes, atm you'd probably have to aim higher than a 760. Indeed, I have a hunch that 570 SLI might match a 770 (that's an option I suppose, get a 2nd used 570 for the interim).
Last year I was debating going 570 SLI and buying a second one, or selling it and going for a single 680. I went with the latter and am glad. I spent a lot of research on the decision, and 570 SLI is slightly lower than a single 680, within 90-95% depending on game. So if the 770 beats the 680 by a solid 5-10% (again, depending on games), it's going to really beat 570 SLI.
Yeah. Im thinking i might stick with a single card. Maybe i should hold off and wait for the 760 Ti that will inevitably come. Really the GTX570 is a great card, its just getting a little long in the tooth, and frankly im kind of spoiled, I always want to make sure any game i can play runs at max settings as far as shadows/textures, etc. I'm apparently the only person on the planet who hates AA (makes things fuzzy), so i typically play most games at 1920x1080 with all settings maxed, 0xAA and 8xAnisotropic. The 570 is doing fine in that respect on everything i play now, i'm just worried about some of the upcoming games like BF4, Witcher 3, etc.
I usually prefer to stay with single cards, i've just seen way too many situations where SLI didnt work (i.e. game didnt support it), produced poor results, etc. Not to mention the heat, and power consumption issues.
Regardless, thanks guys for your responses, really helped me clarify the issue.
Off Topic, im currently running an i7-2600k @ 4.1ghz stable, do you think im fine as far as CPU goes for these future games? Haswell doesn't seem to be a huge jump over Gen3 i7.
Kutark writes: > Yeah. Im thinking i might stick with a single card. ...
Nfarce is spot on about 570 SLI, though 580 SLI can definitely beat a 680 (1.5GB 580s are quite cheap on eBay these days, eg. I've seen them go for as little as 190 UKP total for two). Assuming you're familiar with the difference between a 570 and 580 performance-wise, then with respect to Firestrike Extreme, see the lower graph on this page:
and compare to the following 580 SLI results I obtained (check the Graphics scores; the overall scores are skewed against me a bit as my system is just a quad-core, though in this case I end up with better overall scores anyway vs. a 680, even with the 580s @ stock):
Also, my oc'd 580 SLI Graphics score matches a 780. :D (4506 vs. 4483) However, as many would rightly point out, the 780 has a huge VRAM advantage which is ideal for games like heavily modded Skyrim (though of course there are 3GB 580s, but they tend to cost more - mine was 170 UKP total whereas 1.5GB 580s normally go for around 100 to 125 UKP), and further differences mean a 780 would likely be quicker in other cases, especially if you wanted to run a multi-screen setups with AA, etc.
I haven't bothered running normal Firestrike until now, so here are stock and oc'd runs for comparing to the upper graph on the legit page:
At stock, 580 SLI easily beats a 680. Oc'd, the Graphics score is well ahead of a 780 (infact it's higher than the Titan). This suggests, as one might expect, that as the visual load becomes more complicated, a single better card like a 780 will shows its strengths, ie. SLI'd 570/580s are good at typical HD res, but at resolutions like 2560x1440 a newer card would be more sensible.
There's also the issue of power consumption if you added a 2nd 570; in the long term, would the additional electricity cost end up being not that much less than the cost difference compared to just upgrading to a single newer card? Hard to answer this as elec prices vary wildly by location. There's also the extra heat, and as you say the issue of which games run well in SLI since not all do.
Btw, here's an oddity: changing the SLI rendering mode can have a dramatic effect on Firestrike Extreme scores, eg. while still at stock speed, here are my two 580s using Alternate Frame Rendering 1 (AFR1), compared to the earlier link which uses NVIDIA Recommended (examine the individual test results):
Graphics Test 1 doesn't change, but Graphics Test 2 increases by some 36%, hence the Graphics score shoots up 20% from 3625 to 4363. On the other hand, the Combined Test drops by about 10%. I notice this test uses a lot of VRAM, so perhaps AFR1 doesn't handle heavy VRAM loading so well. I checked by running normal Firestrike with the two different SLI modes, the result was identical, suggesting that AFR1 may be better if a game is taxing VRAM resources a lot, ie. it may be worth manually experimenting with one's games to see if a different SLI mode gives higher performance.
I tested with 3 cards aswell; the variation in results depending on SLI mode is even more pronounced (not checked with 4 cards yet, need to move them into the 3930K case). For the sake of completeness, here's the link (done with rather low 825 core clocks as the M4E mbd used has no spare slots to permit decent oc'ing with 3 cards):
> ... Maybe i should hold > off and wait for the 760 Ti that will inevitably come. ...
I read a piece yesterday which suggested NVIDIA wasn't going to release any more cards this year, but who knows, that could easily change. It would certainly be unusual if they didn't come out with a 760 Ti at some point, or something equivalent.
> im kind of spoiled, I always want to make sure any game i can play runs > at max settings as far as shadows/textures, etc. ...
:D:D Me too.
> ... I'm apparently the only > person on the planet who hates AA (makes things fuzzy), ...
That can certainly happen with some games. Best to experiment with the various options. Back when I was playing Oblivion on a 22" CRT at 2048x1536, I indeed found it better to leave AA off (because the dot pitch was so small, no AA at the high res looked quite good). However, with the games I'm playing now (FC2, Crysis2), turning on AA does look better, but yes some modes are better than others.
> ... The 570 is doing fine in that respect on everything i play now, i'm > just worried about some of the upcoming games like BF4, Witcher 3, etc.
If you don't plan on upgrading your display to a higher res, then adding a 2nd 570 would work quite well performance-wise, but on the other hand...
> situations where SLI didnt work (i.e. game didnt support it), produced > poor results, etc. Not to mention the heat, and power consumption issues.
... those are all very valid points to consider. Mind you, your CPU is running at quite a low clock, so extra heat shouldn't affect your CPU config, unless you have a very simple cooler.
> Off Topic, im currently running an i7-2600k @ 4.1ghz stable, do you think > im fine as far as CPU
A 2600K will easily run at 4.5 to 4.8 depending on the chip, and many will run at 5.0+, so you have plenty of scope for boosting your CPU performance should you feel that necessary. The limitation on how high it can go is more likely to be determined by your PSU, mbd, RAM, CPU cooler config and of course just general luck of the draw re the particular 2600K you have.
I had GTX570 and GTX670 in the past. The performance gap was a consecutive 33 % in favor of GTX670 in 20 different games. Documented that in the forums.
Meaning GTX680 is 50 % faster than GTX570.
So SLI GTX570, if scaling is from 50 to 100 %, should be always ahead of GTX680.
Comparing against last years reference GTX660Ti (915MHz) has little merit - most (>90%) of 660Ti's are non-reference and boosting to 1200MHz is fairly standard (22% more than 980MHz)! The most recent 660Ti's are even sweeter on the power. Including a recent FOC 660Ti and some lesser cards in SLi (GTX 650 ti Boost, which wins hands down and 460) would have made for a very nice review. The 760 wins in high bandwidth games, but not low memory dependent games and apps, and not in terms of Performance/Watt. BTW. I'm not seeing the price comparison, even now the GTX660Ti is still much less expensive.
The GTX670 still looks like a better configuration. Having two disabled SMs and trying to make up the performance difference with clock speed means the 760 is slightly slower than the 670, all the while using more power. There's likely less performance to be gained from overclocking too.
I can only guess that they are heavily binning GK104s and every good chip is going into the 770, and with the product line being cut down the 760 has to accept all the rejects so its spec calls for up to two non-functional SMs.
EVGA lists a 4GB part (04G-P4-2766-KR) and an overclocked 4GB part (04G-P4-2768-KR ). The review only covers the reference 2GB design.
Is there any reason to think the additional 2GB of memory at the same clock rate as a 2GB part will be worth the additional cost? The price difference appears to be $40.
Thank you so much for including GTX 460, 560 Ti in the review! Anandtech delivers once again. I find it absolutely ridiculous when major GPU Review sites only compare new GPUs to the last generation or completely unrelated GPUs unworthy of comparing to to a mainstream card. Good work.
I'll probably get a 700 series card next month, in which case I'll start adding data to my site, which already has a lot of 460 info. Do you have a 460? (or two?) If so, which models?
So is your 460 the version that has a 715MHz core clock? In that case yes indeed, the 760 should give you a major performance bump. Btw, what CPU/mbd do you have? CPU needs to be reasonably decent to feed something like a 760.
Hmm, it took a while but it seems like I finally have a suitable upgrade path from my CF 6950x2 (unlocked)... I paid about $225 for each of those and I just haven't seen a card (or a pair of cards) that would be a substantial enough upgrade for under $500. SLI GTX 760 is more than I was hoping for, when the 770 came in at $400 I almost expected this to come in at $300+.
Now, the question is, will I be bottlenecking myself under future games with 2GB GTX 760s in SLI for gaming at 5760x1200 or 3600x1920? My 6950s have held up well but I've been playing a lot of older games too... Should I be looking at a single GTX 780 instead or something?
As is so often the case, that depends on the games you're playing, and whether you're using any mods, etc. Heavily modded Skyrim definitely needs more than 2GB even with one high-res display. Heavy AA also needs more VRAM. Personally, if I was going for multi-screen gaming, I'd want more than 2GB. Others have mentioned a 4GB 760, so maybe that's an option? Or of course there are the various 3GB AMD cards, though I wouldn't bother with CF until AMD's new drivers are out.
Some advantages of getting a single 780: better upgrade path in the future, less power consumption, no SLI issues. The down side of course is the cost.
The most attractive feature is the 256 bit bus that would enable you a huge bandwidth and you can deal with any sort of resolutions if necessary. and for laptop accessories and many more, check this out- http://tinyurl.com/neqrzr9
Wow. initially I kind of panned the GTX 770 because I didn't feel it was enough of a jump from the 670 for the price difference. Seemed like it wasn't a big hardware jump and that you were paying for the software goodies like GPU Boost 2.0, but after seeing the number difference between the 670 and 770 I gotta say I'm pleasantly surprised with how well the 770 performs.
Seeing how the new GTX960 is just slightly ahead of GTX760, i guess buying the GTX760 was a smart choice. The gap between GTX970 and GTX960 is MASSIVE.
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Aditya211935 - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I guess I m a bit early.A5 - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Looks pretty solid for the price.Samus - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I feel like an idiot buying a 660Ti two months ago for $300. At least I got the 3GB version that'll be "somewhat" future-proof for BF4 as the maps are expected to tax 2GB cards.gamoniac - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Don't look back. You can only make your decision based on the information you had and your needs at the time. If you could look just 2 minutes ahead, you would be a billionaire now and wouldn't be participating in this conversation.just4U - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
this is essentially a cheaper 670.. coming it at or below the price of the 660TI. I don't see your purchase as being one of those you think $*!@! over. Hah. Your card is a bit slower but not noticeably so and the added ram may benefit you down the road.Hixbot - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
A cheaper, and slower 670. So not really a 670 at all.just4U - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I'd agree.. although pricing here is 275-300.. Don't see any at 249. The 7950 is 300.. They will have to lower that down a tiny bit to be competitive I think, take a small hit in performance (but more ram possible benefit later?) and their games bundle the trade off for consumers should be about equal.Lovolt - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
Not sure where 'here' is, but newegg has 3 models at $250 and another 6 at $260 (on June 26).just4U - Thursday, June 27, 2013 - link
Calgary Canada.. We have a newegg.ca but it's not as good as your newegg I think that's to do with taxation and not having a actual warehouse here.ericore - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
No, they have warehouses in Canada; if you've ever ordered a big order you'd realize this since not everything ships at once; comes from different warehouses in Vancouver, Mississauga and several others. They charge us more because they can, but only charge more on certain items so that we can't revolt. Generally the can prices are very close to the US ones, but the odd time they are significantly more. Processing and taxes are also cheaper in the US, but we do get the crappy end of the stick at times. There was a specialty motherboard, on newegg.com this was 100, and newegg.ca this was 150; can't remember the model.kishorshack - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Looks like the GPU gains over a two year cycle is more than CPU gainsSpending on GPU's is more worth while than Spending on CPU's
Specially if you start from Sandy Bridge in CPU's
DanNeely - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
3D Rendering is a trivially parallelizable workload. As a result it can roughly double in performance with each full node process shrink just by keeping the core design the same but putting twice as many of them on the die. Real world behavior differs mostly in that some of the additional die space is used to enable things that weren't practical before instead of just making all the existing features twice as fast.wumpus - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
That is only strictly true if you are willing to use twice as much electricity and generate/remove twice as much heat (it could approach costing twice as much as well, but not nearly as often). A good chunk of each update needs to go to making the GPU have a higher TFLOP/W or the thing will melt.ewood - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
luckily many of those issues are mitigated by transition to a smaller process node, as DanNeeley said. your statement is more applicable to dual die cards, not new processors having twice the functional units.maltanar - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
That is unfortunately no longer true, smaller processes do not benefit from the so-called 'Dennard scaling' anymore, without a lot of trickery from semiconductor engineers.DanNeely - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
They may have to work harder at it; but as long as they're able to continue doing what you refer to as trickery, the result for us end users is the same.tential - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
CPU gains have been made, just not in performance. We don't need performance on the CPU side for a LOT of applications. Like I always say, if you had double the CPU performance, you still wouldn't gain much FPS in most games.Intel would be cannibalizing it's higher end processors if it kept making CPU gains. Instead, it focuses on power consumption, to fit better CPUs into smaller things such as notebooks, tablets, etc. Look at the Macbook Air Review and then tell me we haven't made CPU gains.
UltraTech79 - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
More worthwhile than what? What are you even talking about? Today's i5 chips arnt the bottleneck to any of the GPUs here in any game. So what you're saying is irrelevant.ericore - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
Aint that the truth, the biggest change was from the 500 series to the 600 series.The 600 series make most radeons look like dinosaurs or AMD processors.
Intel is dicking around giving us less than 10% speed inprovement in each generation.
Can't wait for AMD to release their steamroller 8 core, except where latency is crucial it will match haswell and cost a fraction. Haswell will still technically be faster, but only in benchmarks, in practice they will be identical. The change from piledriver to steamroller is like from a a pentium 4 to a core 2 duo. It's not a new architecture, but has so many improvements that it ought to be called one.
MarcVenice - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I checked all the games, and the first 4-5 games the 7950 Boost wins, the other the GTX 760 wins. I didn't add up the numbers, but are you guys sure the HD 7950 Boost is 8% slower overall?And what's anandtech's stance on frametimes/fcat? Are those only used when problems arise, new games? I realize they take a lot of time, but I think they can be quite valuable in determing which card is the fastest.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Going by my chart, I have the GTX 760 winning in 7 of 10 games (all but DiRT, Hitman, and Crysis 1) at our highest 1080p quality settings, which is where I'm focusing on for a card this expensive. Of those magnitude matters; most of those GTX 760 wins are in the double digits, so the average does indeed end up being 8%As for frametimes, the idea is that we would normally include them. That said this review left us crunched for time; I would have likely needed to drop the Fermi cards to make time. With that in mind, there's absolutely nothing interesting going on with single-GPU frametimes right now with the games we use. The only place NVIDIA still differ are under multi-GPU scenarios.
Zstream - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Shouldn't we be using the median instead of average?ewood - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
median, mean and mode all show very different things. you should have all three to draw detailed conclusions, however if only one is available i would personally prefer it be the mean.ShieTar - Thursday, June 27, 2013 - link
With a sample size of 10, the median would not be a very helpful information. To be honest, the mean is not all the important either. The distribution of performances is not all that random when comparing nVidia and AMD, but rather there are significant preferences for one architecture by each game.So everybody on the lookout for a new card should mainly be checking for a benchmark specifically on the game he/she spends the most time with. For this reason, I would love to see the benchmarks on Anandtech include the name of the engine for each game (if it is a licensed one), and maybe provide some handy reference to figure out what other games use the same reference.
And personally, as a player who does not play reaction-based games like shooters or racers a lot, I would love AT to re-introduce a BioWare and/or Blizzard title back into their benchmark-zoo. Even if those are not extremely new or demanding, I think they still have a high importance for a large number of players who don't care much to shoot virtual people in their virtual faces.
MarcVenice - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I see, I counted Sleeping Dogs as a win for the HD 7950 as well, considering the minimum fps is a bit higher. Thanks for the reply, I agree that if all is well with frametimes in a certain game, fraps is still a good way to measure raw rendering power.JeBarr - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Most multi-GPU users are reporting that the frame time issue mostly exists for 2-way SLI and Quad SLI. It seems that 3-way SLI or Dual GPU single slot SLI is the way to go for gamers concerned about the stutters. I'm not sure about 4-way SLI though, since I don't bother with it anymore. I can however, confirm that in my personal experience a single GPU or 3-way SLI is mostly unaffected.draknon - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
This seems like a good spot to upgrade from my 460gtxEzioAs - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Yeah, it is. My original plan was to get the GTX 760, but Nvidia delayed it and I wasn't going to wait anymore, so I went and bought the GTX 660.DanNeely - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I'm tempted to upgrade to it from my 560 when I built a Haswell box later this summer and put the difference between it and a higher end card toward a better SSD, etc and then get a top end Maxwell based card next year.I'm a bit concerned about ending up in the same trap I did last time though. I bought the 560 as a stopgap replacement in Jan 2012 after stupidity killed my 5870, with the intent of upgrading to a GK100 based card in half a year or so only to have nVidia fumble its top end launch.
omarccx - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
It seems like an even greater upgrade from my HD4000. :xkarasaj - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Your thoughts seem to be a bit... Lacking :) thanks for the review!Ryan Smith - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Did the CMS eat the final page again? Everything looks fine on my end.karasaj - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
The final page was missing when I first looked, after about 5 minutes it seemed cleared up :)ilkhan - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to driver games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2013.I think you meant "drive" not "driver"
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Indeed. Thank you. Fixed.Guspaz - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
tl;dr: It's a GeForce GTX 670 for $100 less.That's not a dig on the article, it's well written, but that does seem to be what I'm reading from all the test results.
Atlas T. - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Very informative review. The GTX 760 is undoubtedly a potential buy.I wonder if my i5-2310 2.9GHz (locked CPU) would manage to handle this little beast fully overclocked?
omarccx - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
It should do fine.UltraTech79 - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
Even a shit i5 will be fine.Wreckage - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
AMD will now have to sell the 7970 for $200 and bundle 12 games with it.Spunjji - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Why would a faster card need to be cheaper? Shoo, shoo! Back under your bridge.UltraTech79 - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
???vailr - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Will there be a "Small Form Factor" version, similar to:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
chizow - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Sad day in the GPU industry when a part that's ~75% of the *SECOND* tier ASIC and sells for $250 can be considered "Enthusiast".It looks like Nvidia's marketing push to carve out ultra and uber enthusiast markets has worked, on the media anyways. Parts in this range used to be referred to as mainstream/midrange performance or gamer cards in the past, never once referred to as "Enthusiast".
Honestly if this $250 part is "Enthusiast" what are the $400 770, the $650 780, the $1000 Titan??? I guess we need to cough up $250 more for each Uber we place in front of Enthusiast; maybe at some point we just find new words and categories when one has been devalued and depreciated to the point it no longer holds any meaning.
Aside from the rant, the part's price and performance looks good. It's pretty clear at this point Kepler benefits more right now from the ROPs and bandwidth than SP and TMU. May change with future shader intensive titles, but the 760 pretty much confirms the 660Ti (and virtually any 30%+ bandwidth-neutered parts) was a big mistake.
thesavvymage - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
who cares what ASIC it comes from, its irrelevant. Its a $250 gpu that performs as well or better than more expensive cards. Thats not mainstream, its enthusiast. Everything above it is enthusiast. The absolutely biggest amount of gpu sales come from those south of $200, so thats what most people consider mainstream.chizow - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
People who don't enjoy getting less for the same price care what ASIC it comes from. I guess you don't mind getting smaller and smaller burgers, or less and less ounces in the food you buy at the grocery each year?There is nothing enthusiast about this product, it's mainstream performance in the same price and market bracket that litters all of Nvidia's previous marketing slides in this $200-$300 range. Was the 8800GT an enthusiast card? No. Was the 560Ti an enthusiast card? No. Yet they both satisfy the criteria you set forth.
teiglin - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I was just thinking about this after reading the review over at Tom's (they refer to the 760 as mainstream). It's an interesting sociological exercise, how different people view the term enthusiast. Given the massive stratification at the high end--I mean, Titan, ffs--what is the cutoff for being an "enthusiast" card? Why even bother with hyperbolic modifiers when nobody who spends even $400 on a GPU would do so without knowing the difference between a 770, a 780, and a Titan, not to mention the 7970 [GHz edition], 7950 [Boost], etc.?Personally, I'm inclined to agree with Ryan here. This is still a heckuva lot more graphics horsepower than, say, certain yet-to-be-released consoles, which I would argue define a "mainstream" baseline. Though if you're just commenting on how much the lowest common denominator in graphics performance has fallen, then that may be a sad day for the GPU industry, but it's a good day for consumers, who are able to get way more GPU for much less money than a couple years ago.
chizow - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
Sorry but getting "way more GPU for much less money than a couple years ago" is just progress and should be expected.The context for how different people view the term enthusiast should be consistent, based on historical price and performance categories as well as physical and marketing segmentation factors. All of which indicate this is NOT an enthusiast part. Nvidia has clearly defined this in the past, and the enthusiast market did not start until $350+.
Some may say, "who cares", I guess people who actually shop in this $350+ market care, because calling a $250 part sets a terrible precedent, same as selling a tier-2 midrange ASIC like GK104 at $500 sets a terrible precedent. Why? Because if Nvidia is selling their 2nd fastest ASIC at "Enthusiast" price ranges starting at $250 all the way to $500, that gives them license to sell their actual Enthusiast parts at much more than $500.
Is it any surprise that we now have $650 GTX 780 and $1000 GTX Titan and GTX 690? Of course not. Why? Because people are doing cartwheels in the streets over the privilege of buying a stripped down, overclocked 2nd-tier ASIC for $250, because it's the new enthusiast part!
UltraTech79 - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
I put the $1000 Tital as 'Rich retard soon parts with his money.' Also, shut the fuck up elitest dumbfuck. Anyone willing to spend $200+ on a GPU is an enthusiast and is looking for more than just enough.chizow - Friday, July 5, 2013 - link
Yes just like the guy who rices up his Civic is now driving a "luxury sports car". Just another idiot that doesn't understand I'm actually advocating against elitest pricing and marketing brackets, move along if you don't understand the concepts and repercussions.YukaKun - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
And where's my beloved GTX670?! Are you guys hiding something here that nVidia doesn't want me to see?No, but really; I know it's not it's direct replacement, but I'd really like to see the numbers how they stack up.
Cheers!
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
The GTX 670 is in all of our charts. All of this data is also on Bench.YukaKun - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Yeah, just realized it is... I wonder why I didn't see it, lol.Selective reading at its finest indeed.
Thanks Ryan!
HisDivineOrder - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
AMD is now saying the Never Settle Reloaded bundle is running out at retailers. That means, you should be mentioning that it isn't going to last much longer and doesn't really factor into the value of the 7950/7950B unless they decide to renew it.I suspect though they'll do a price drop soon.
DanNeely - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I'd expect them to create a new bundle instead.kallogan - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Too big, barely better than 660 ti at higher power consumption. What's the point ?MrSpadge - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Too big: there will loads of custom coolers, just like on the current cards. Shorter ones as well.barely better than 660 ti at higher power consumption: the additional performance is approximately proportional to the added power draw, so efficiency hardly suffers. Of course I'll stick with my OC'ed 660Ti, but this newcomer is just more balanced for everything but the most pure compute tasks.
What's the point: cheaper for nVidia to produce (one SMX less) and sold cheaper. It's a win-win.
jimwatkins - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I suppose this is of little interest to most readers, but since your doing computer performance, how about a bitcoin GH performance chart. Video cards are actually of waning value in the bitcoin arms race but it's an interesting aspect of compute performance nonetheless and the high end AMD cards certainly still produce value.dcianf - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I'm excited to see them maintain compatibility with my 660Ti/670 full card waterblock. PLEASE LET THIS BE A NEW STANDARD!JimmiG - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Well it's hotter, more power hungry and louder than the GTX 670 while still being slower, which is kind of disappointing for something that's supposed to be an evolution of the GTX 600 series. Still, it does feel like "GTX 660 Done Right" in some ways, as that card was always too slow, forcing people to pay $400 for the GTX 670.It's sad that prices have been creeping up so much without people noticing. $499 used to be the "ultra-enthusiast" segment, and $199 would buy you a very decent card. In 2012 and early 2013, $400 was the "mid-range" and $999 the "ultra high-end". GTX 760 brings the mid-range back to $250 again, at least until the GTX 860 come out at $499...
DanNeely - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
The 8800 Ultra was a $650 card. Ignoring the Titan we're back where we were 7 years ago.nsiboro - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
AMD delaying Sea Island until Q3'2013...I just feel someone over @AMD is crazy and didn't think thru end users' point of view.
With the release of Haswell, many will be putting together new boxes and the "new" GPU they'll get will be gtx760/770/780. AMD losing fans and revenue... *sigh*
silverblue - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I'm not sure I follow. Haswell doesn't appear to have amazed that many people - you could get away with an SB or IB build which overclock enough to make up the performance difference. If you already have one of those, with proper cooling you don't need to save money for a marginally better CPU - spend it on graphics instead.DanNeely - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
It's not the SB/IB people upgrading; it's those of us with first generation i5/i7 systems or even older core 2 quads pulling the trigger now. AMD is out of the race except at the bottom and it's probably going to be two more years before Intel offers anything else worth mentioning on the desktop. (No socketed Broadwell chips, and assuming IVB-e and Haswell-e are as underwhelming at the $3xx pricepoint as SB-e is.)Dark_wizzie - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I wished it included a benchmark with Skyrim on 2560x1440, with the hardcore texture mods on, AA/AS on pretty high with Ultra. Debating between this ($250), 7970... ($310!!!), 770 ($400)Ryan Smith - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
You request will be taken under consideration, but I'll tell you right now that you shouldn't expect it to happen. One of the tenets of our testing methods is that we don't test with mods; they're often not optimized (or worse, optimized only for the developer's system) and frequently updated (making our benchmarks useless). Plus the number of users on any given mod is very low, which would mean our benchmarks wouldn't be very applicable to most of our readers.edlee - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
something tells me if you SLI two GTX 760 it would destroy the GTX 780 at a lesser pricexTRICKYxx - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
Google some benchmarks. It goes toe-to-toe with the GTX 690 and Titan in every game I've seen. All for $500... Good deal!GTan - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Hopefully I will be building my first PC ever in a few weeks, I'm glad that Nvidia released the 760, since the 770 at $400+ is too expensive for me. My budget for my PC is $800-900. I was originally 90% sure I was gonna buy the GTX 760, $250 is a great price, but now since I've seen deals for the 7970 for as low as $300, I'm wondering is it worth it for pay a extra $50 for the 7970 (plus the 4 games). End question, what is a better value for the newb PC builder: a $250 GTX 760 or a $300 7970? Thanks!thesavvymage - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
if you want the games, 7970. If not, id go wit hthe 760 for being quieter and using less powerkennyG - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I for one was not happy with the out come of the 760 tested . I wanted Nvidia to totally take the 670 and enhance it and make a 760..Do the same process like they did with the 680 to 770. I really wanted to buy this card... Waiting for this one and I'm pisssed.Laststop311 - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
I wonder how 2 of these(500) in sli compared to the GTX 780 single gpu (650)xTRICKYxx - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
About Titan/GTX 690 levels.Ribozyme - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Ryan, could you please elaborate why the 760 draws considerably more power than a 670 while still being slower? Is this because a lower clocked 670 is compared to a pretty high clocked 760 in comparison? What would the situation be if you compared a 760 to a 670 clock per clock? And would I be able to power this with a be quiet straight power e9 400w + 3770k folding 24/7 ?And last question, are your power consumption values measured from the socket with a watt meter or with ampere meter on each cable and then added up?
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
The biggest difference between the 760 and 670 is that the 760 has GPU Boost 2.0, which is a significantly different method of adjusting clockspeeds around temperature and power limits. The 670 had a TDP of 170W, but in practice its power target (a concept that doesn't exist with Boost 2.0) was below that. Whereas the GTX 760, if not constrained by temperatures, will get closer to its 170W TDP more frequently.The other difference is as you note: clockspeeds. The GTX 760 has fewer SMXes, but it operates at a higher clockspeed and with higher voltages (1.2v vs. 1.175v). That really eats up power at the highest boost bins. The 760 is essentially a little less wide and a little deeper than 670; clock for clock the 670 is going to be faster (but it won't be able to clock quite as high).
As for your PSU question, I'm afraid I can't answer that in any confidence. Based on specs I'd think that would work, but I don't know anything about that PSU.
Finally, power consumption is measured at the wall.
JimmiG - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
Many non-reference GTX 670's boost higher, though. For example, my KFA² GTX 670 almost always boosts to 1,189 MHz, sometimes higher. If you can find a cheap, non-reference GTX 670 before they go out of stock, it might be a better deal.vision33r - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
The last 3 years we saw really no innovation in the desktop GPU market. If you bought a HD 5870, you can still rock that card today in every game without any issue. We will see most of today's card get tossed when 4k monitors become a reality. Even SLI/CF top end cards today will score sub 30fps when games are played natively at 4k res.Kutark - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Ive been looking for the right price point to upgrade my GTX570, especially with BS4 coming out soon. I was hoping this would be it, but it looks like its really not enough of a jump to justify $250, especially when i could put that money towards a PS4 for some of the console games that wont be ported to PC. Any opinions otherwise?Kutark - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Haha, meant to say BF4, but yah, you get what i meant lol.mapesdhs - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
:D That was a good one. :)
I suppose it depends on what you want from an upgrade. Are you looking for at
least a 2X speedup? If so then yes, atm you'd probably have to aim higher than
a 760. Indeed, I have a hunch that 570 SLI might match a 770 (that's an option I
suppose, get a 2nd used 570 for the interim).
Ian.
Nfarce - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
Last year I was debating going 570 SLI and buying a second one, or selling it and going for a single 680. I went with the latter and am glad. I spent a lot of research on the decision, and 570 SLI is slightly lower than a single 680, within 90-95% depending on game. So if the 770 beats the 680 by a solid 5-10% (again, depending on games), it's going to really beat 570 SLI.Kutark - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
Yeah. Im thinking i might stick with a single card. Maybe i should hold off and wait for the 760 Ti that will inevitably come. Really the GTX570 is a great card, its just getting a little long in the tooth, and frankly im kind of spoiled, I always want to make sure any game i can play runs at max settings as far as shadows/textures, etc. I'm apparently the only person on the planet who hates AA (makes things fuzzy), so i typically play most games at 1920x1080 with all settings maxed, 0xAA and 8xAnisotropic. The 570 is doing fine in that respect on everything i play now, i'm just worried about some of the upcoming games like BF4, Witcher 3, etc.I usually prefer to stay with single cards, i've just seen way too many situations where SLI didnt work (i.e. game didnt support it), produced poor results, etc. Not to mention the heat, and power consumption issues.
Regardless, thanks guys for your responses, really helped me clarify the issue.
Off Topic, im currently running an i7-2600k @ 4.1ghz stable, do you think im fine as far as CPU goes for these future games? Haswell doesn't seem to be a huge jump over Gen3 i7.
mapesdhs - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
Kutark writes:
> Yeah. Im thinking i might stick with a single card. ...
Nfarce is spot on about 570 SLI, though 580 SLI can definitely beat a 680
(1.5GB 580s are quite cheap on eBay these days, eg. I've seen them go for
as little as 190 UKP total for two). Assuming you're familiar with the
difference between a 570 and 580 performance-wise, then with respect to
Firestrike Extreme, see the lower graph on this page:
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/2201/9/
and compare to the following 580 SLI results I obtained (check the
Graphics scores; the overall scores are skewed against me a bit as my
system is just a quad-core, though in this case I end up with better
overall scores anyway vs. a 680, even with the 580s @ stock):
Stock: http://www.3dmark.com/fs/588100
Oc'd: http://www.3dmark.com/fs/518352
For reference, here's just one 580 at stock, showing that it's Graphics
score matches the article's 580 quite nicely:
http://www.3dmark.com/fs/588046
Also, my oc'd 580 SLI Graphics score matches a 780. :D (4506 vs. 4483)
However, as many would rightly point out, the 780 has a huge VRAM advantage
which is ideal for games like heavily modded Skyrim (though of course there
are 3GB 580s, but they tend to cost more - mine was 170 UKP total whereas
1.5GB 580s normally go for around 100 to 125 UKP), and further differences
mean a 780 would likely be quicker in other cases, especially if you wanted
to run a multi-screen setups with AA, etc.
I haven't bothered running normal Firestrike until now, so here are stock
and oc'd runs for comparing to the upper graph on the legit page:
Stock: http://www.3dmark.com/fs/588907
Oc'd: http://www.3dmark.com/fs/588883
At stock, 580 SLI easily beats a 680. Oc'd, the Graphics score is well
ahead of a 780 (infact it's higher than the Titan). This suggests, as one
might expect, that as the visual load becomes more complicated, a single
better card like a 780 will shows its strengths, ie. SLI'd 570/580s are
good at typical HD res, but at resolutions like 2560x1440 a newer card
would be more sensible.
There's also the issue of power consumption if you added a 2nd 570; in
the long term, would the additional electricity cost end up being not that
much less than the cost difference compared to just upgrading to a single
newer card? Hard to answer this as elec prices vary wildly by location.
There's also the extra heat, and as you say the issue of which games run
well in SLI since not all do.
Btw, here's an oddity: changing the SLI rendering mode can have a
dramatic effect on Firestrike Extreme scores, eg. while still at stock
speed, here are my two 580s using Alternate Frame Rendering 1 (AFR1),
compared to the earlier link which uses NVIDIA Recommended (examine the
individual test results):
http://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/588100/fs/588603
Graphics Test 1 doesn't change, but Graphics Test 2 increases by some
36%, hence the Graphics score shoots up 20% from 3625 to 4363. On the
other hand, the Combined Test drops by about 10%. I notice this test uses
a lot of VRAM, so perhaps AFR1 doesn't handle heavy VRAM loading so well.
I checked by running normal Firestrike with the two different SLI modes,
the result was identical, suggesting that AFR1 may be better if a game is
taxing VRAM resources a lot, ie. it may be worth manually experimenting
with one's games to see if a different SLI mode gives higher performance.
I tested with 3 cards aswell; the variation in results depending on SLI
mode is even more pronounced (not checked with 4 cards yet, need to move
them into the 3930K case). For the sake of completeness, here's the link
(done with rather low 825 core clocks as the M4E mbd used has no spare
slots to permit decent oc'ing with 3 cards):
http://www.3dmark.com/fs/518524
> ... Maybe i should hold
> off and wait for the 760 Ti that will inevitably come. ...
I read a piece yesterday which suggested NVIDIA wasn't going to release
any more cards this year, but who knows, that could easily change. It
would certainly be unusual if they didn't come out with a 760 Ti at some
point, or something equivalent.
> im kind of spoiled, I always want to make sure any game i can play runs
> at max settings as far as shadows/textures, etc. ...
:D:D Me too.
> ... I'm apparently the only
> person on the planet who hates AA (makes things fuzzy), ...
That can certainly happen with some games. Best to experiment with the
various options. Back when I was playing Oblivion on a 22" CRT at
2048x1536, I indeed found it better to leave AA off (because the dot
pitch was so small, no AA at the high res looked quite good). However,
with the games I'm playing now (FC2, Crysis2), turning on AA does look
better, but yes some modes are better than others.
> ... The 570 is doing fine in that respect on everything i play now, i'm
> just worried about some of the upcoming games like BF4, Witcher 3, etc.
If you don't plan on upgrading your display to a higher res, then adding
a 2nd 570 would work quite well performance-wise, but on the other hand...
> situations where SLI didnt work (i.e. game didnt support it), produced
> poor results, etc. Not to mention the heat, and power consumption issues.
... those are all very valid points to consider. Mind you, your CPU is
running at quite a low clock, so extra heat shouldn't affect your CPU config,
unless you have a very simple cooler.
> Off Topic, im currently running an i7-2600k @ 4.1ghz stable, do you think
> im fine as far as CPU
A 2600K will easily run at 4.5 to 4.8 depending on the chip, and many will
run at 5.0+, so you have plenty of scope for boosting your CPU performance
should you feel that necessary. The limitation on how high it can go is more
likely to be determined by your PSU, mbd, RAM, CPU cooler config and of course
just general luck of the draw re the particular 2600K you have.
Ian.
Artas1984 - Sunday, August 16, 2015 - link
You have done your research very wrong.I had GTX570 and GTX670 in the past. The performance gap was a consecutive 33 % in favor of GTX670 in 20 different games. Documented that in the forums.
Meaning GTX680 is 50 % faster than GTX570.
So SLI GTX570, if scaling is from 50 to 100 %, should be always ahead of GTX680.
skgiven - Sunday, August 4, 2013 - link
Comparing against last years reference GTX660Ti (915MHz) has little merit - most (>90%) of 660Ti's are non-reference and boosting to 1200MHz is fairly standard (22% more than 980MHz)! The most recent 660Ti's are even sweeter on the power.Including a recent FOC 660Ti and some lesser cards in SLi (GTX 650 ti Boost, which wins hands down and 460) would have made for a very nice review.
The 760 wins in high bandwidth games, but not low memory dependent games and apps, and not in terms of Performance/Watt.
BTW. I'm not seeing the price comparison, even now the GTX660Ti is still much less expensive.
AlucardX - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link
doesn't look like much of an improvement compared to my overclocked 7850 that i bought for $250 over a year ago..Parablooper - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
Wow. On 1080p Battlefield it beats a 7970... $270 price point vs. $400.... I like AMD but they better make a move soon or they're off the market.king-dubs - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
It doesn't. Anandtech is still using 7950/7970/7970GHz results from pre-12.11 drivers.http://tpucdn.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_760/i...
Also the 7970 dropped briefly to ~$300 two days ago, and the 7950 (Sapphire Dual-X) is still at $259 after MIR @ Newegg.
king-dubs - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
Guru3D results are consistent with TPU:http://www.guru3d.com/index.php?ct=articles&ac...
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
The 7970 results are with Catalyst 13.5 B2 (freshly composed for the GTX 780/770 reviews).The 7950 results are with Catalyst 13.6 B2 (freshly composed for this article)
JlHADJOE - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
The GTX670 still looks like a better configuration. Having two disabled SMs and trying to make up the performance difference with clock speed means the 760 is slightly slower than the 670, all the while using more power. There's likely less performance to be gained from overclocking too.I can only guess that they are heavily binning GK104s and every good chip is going into the 770, and with the product line being cut down the 760 has to accept all the rejects so its spec calls for up to two non-functional SMs.
intercede007 - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
EVGA lists a 4GB part (04G-P4-2766-KR) and an overclocked 4GB part (04G-P4-2768-KR ). The review only covers the reference 2GB design.Is there any reason to think the additional 2GB of memory at the same clock rate as a 2GB part will be worth the additional cost? The price difference appears to be $40.
monkeydude66 - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
Thank you so much for including GTX 460, 560 Ti in the review! Anandtech delivers once again. I find it absolutely ridiculous when major GPU Review sites only compare new GPUs to the last generation or completely unrelated GPUs unworthy of comparing to to a mainstream card. Good work.mapesdhs - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
I'll probably get a 700 series card next month, in which case I'll start adding data to my
site, which already has a lot of 460 info. Do you have a 460? (or two?) If so, which models?
Ian.
monkeydude66 - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
Yeah, I have the Gigabyte GV-N460OC-1GI with 1GB. Planing to upgrade to GTX760 after seeing the +100% performance change.mapesdhs - Monday, July 1, 2013 - link
So is your 460 the version that has a 715MHz core clock? In that case yes indeed, the 760
should give you a major performance bump. Btw, what CPU/mbd do you have? CPU needs
to be reasonably decent to feed something like a 760.
Ian.
SilverBack - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
Ryan the GTX 760 4 gb is out can we get a comparison?slickr - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
Too expensive for me, $250 is still quite a lot, especially since the GTX 460 1GB was $200, then the GTX 560 was $200.I'm going to wait for competition from AMD and see if they offer better value for money.
rs2 - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
How did the 660Ti score so highly on the Crysis 3 benchmark @ 2560x1440? Seems like an invalid result?Ryan Smith - Thursday, June 27, 2013 - link
Good catch. That was a data entry error; that was supposed to be 34, not 44. It has been corrected. Thanks.Impulses - Thursday, June 27, 2013 - link
Hmm, it took a while but it seems like I finally have a suitable upgrade path from my CF 6950x2 (unlocked)... I paid about $225 for each of those and I just haven't seen a card (or a pair of cards) that would be a substantial enough upgrade for under $500. SLI GTX 760 is more than I was hoping for, when the 770 came in at $400 I almost expected this to come in at $300+.Now, the question is, will I be bottlenecking myself under future games with 2GB GTX 760s in SLI for gaming at 5760x1200 or 3600x1920? My 6950s have held up well but I've been playing a lot of older games too... Should I be looking at a single GTX 780 instead or something?
mapesdhs - Monday, July 1, 2013 - link
As is so often the case, that depends on the games you're playing, and whether you're
using any mods, etc. Heavily modded Skyrim definitely needs more than 2GB even with
one high-res display. Heavy AA also needs more VRAM. Personally, if I was going for
multi-screen gaming, I'd want more than 2GB. Others have mentioned a 4GB 760, so
maybe that's an option? Or of course there are the various 3GB AMD cards, though I
wouldn't bother with CF until AMD's new drivers are out.
Some advantages of getting a single 780: better upgrade path in the future, less
power consumption, no SLI issues. The down side of course is the cost.
Ian.
hasseb64 - Thursday, June 27, 2013 - link
headline:"The new Enthusiast kepler"
Enthusiast?
Ever heard about "Main stream"?
I have nothing more to say!
tynopik - Thursday, June 27, 2013 - link
typo: 'less than idea for an action game' -> idealFar Cry 3 page
sdgvtree - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
nput this URL:==== [www.shun-happlymall.com] ====
you can find many cheap and fashion stuff
dineshramdin - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
The most attractive feature is the 256 bit bus that would enable you a huge bandwidth and you can deal with any sort of resolutions if necessary. and for laptop accessories and many more, check this out- http://tinyurl.com/neqrzr9
Buddhaz Priest - Friday, July 12, 2013 - link
Wow. initially I kind of panned the GTX 770 because I didn't feel it was enough of a jump from the 670 for the price difference. Seemed like it wasn't a big hardware jump and that you were paying for the software goodies like GPU Boost 2.0, but after seeing the number difference between the 670 and 770 I gotta say I'm pleasantly surprised with how well the 770 performs.BadThad - Friday, June 13, 2014 - link
Let's see, no mention of the R270? You can find them for $150-175 (cheaper than the GTX) and they are virtually the same as far as performance.j18kuhn - Thursday, January 22, 2015 - link
I got one at best buy for my first pc for 210 and now I'm waiting on the rest of my parts from amazonArtas1984 - Sunday, August 16, 2015 - link
Seeing how the new GTX960 is just slightly ahead of GTX760, i guess buying the GTX760 was a smart choice. The gap between GTX970 and GTX960 is MASSIVE.