Few things get us more excited around here. This high-end graphics card launches and as far as single GPU, the GTX 780 Ti is about as high end as it gets. We will start with its specs. It has the same GK 110 lineage in the Titan DNA as the GTX Titan and the GTX 780. It also has full 2,880 CUDA cores that is 25 percent more than GTX 780. It is clocked in 875 MHz base clock and 928 MHz boost clock. These additional CUDA cores and higher clock speeds complements to the 3 gigabytes of DDR5 memory at 7 gigahertz 384-bit bus.
Therefore, we are actually getting faster memory as well. Physically, the card looks pretty darn similar to the previous GEN. There are two SLI connectors that will support two, three, or 4-way SLI. You have that same acoustically optimized fan that is less jarring when it has to speed up or slow down.
We have a cast aluminum shroud with dark aluminum fins visible through the polycarbonate windows, which is mounted on a vapor chamber that takes heat away from the GPU. On the back of the card, we have two dual-link DVI ports, HDMI, and DisplayPort.
Now with support for 4k and triple surround, however, I maintain that this is expensive and somewhat irrelevant right now. I think it is just a feature checkbox, which they want to have compared to the competition. We have yet to see a gaming rig with a 4K monitor on it.
At the bottom, we find the PCI Express 3.0 16x connector and then at the top, to correspond with that 250 watt TDP, we've got an 8-pin and 6-pin power connectors.
The cooler is a blower style design so while a little bit if heat is going to be exhausted at the back of the card into your case, most of it is going to be exhausted out to the rear of your PC case, so it does not affect the cooling of the other components.
We have the usual suspects in terms of in-game technology. DirectX 11 and NVidia Occlusion, Tessellation and PhysX, and there are some upcoming games and hot new titles that support these features. There is no mention for 3D vision but do not worry people it still supports it.
G-Sync on the other hand is a game-changer. It looks dramatically better when the frame rate is variable at all, which happens in every game as you move from more or less demanding scenes and in between them. It dynamically adapts the refresh rate of your monitor, which is how many images per second, according to the frame rate actually being outputted from your GPU.
Now it does rely on hardware support but we are expecting to see monitor sometime in 2014. You also need a Kepler-based GPU. We are going to see great high resolution, high refresh rate designs, with a variety of different panel types, whether it is TN or IP. These are going to come in at reasonable prices because trust me people I am one of the several people on earth that actually seen this. It is amazing and once you try it, you are going to want it.
GPU Boost 2.0 functionality has been tweaked somewhat with their power-balancing feature but fundamentally, the technology has not changed much. It is monitoring voltage, temperatures, power consumption, and clock speeds in order to deliver the most balance performance at any given time without exceeding any of those parameters.
Now, there is a difference between how AMD views balance performance and how NVidia views balance performance on this generation.
It runs substantially cooler and much quieter than the R9 290 series but there were things that we did not like about this implementation. It is very limited control in terms of voltages and power limits, which gives us a whopping 106 percent power limit maximum and in things like temperature settings, it seems to be ignoring what we say anyway.
We set a maximum 95 degrees but it did not run at 95 degrees, it just ran 83 degrees. so it seems that it is taking our inputs as suggestions. With that said, we still achieved over 1200 megahertz on the core, so that is an amazing overclock and very beastly performance as you people are going to see. Maybe it just runs at 83 degrees and that is all there is to it. This could be partly due to the larger die, as well as the more mature design. A larger die allows you to spread the heat out more easily using the heat sink.
GeForce experience continues to get updates, but first the stuff that has not been changed, it still gives the automatic driver updater that gives a little notification at the corner. “Hey about that new game, hey there's a new driver to go with it. Make sure you install it.”
It also gives you optimize settings for your games and it is actually quite a complicated process to determine this. Actual people sit there and play the game find a benchmark of couple of segments that are demanding, and then they determine a target frame rate for these demanding segments weighing graphics settings against each other. You know play around the sliders. Will this is actually make it look that much better and how hard is it for the graphics hardware to handle. Moreover, they find the best settings that satisfy the FPS target and still make it look as good as possible, and then they run all that information through automated validation across out all the hardware configurations in order to deliver you a playable game experience. I have tried it and it works. I ended up taking a couple things further but the great thing about the GeForce experience is that you can have it deliver better graphical fidelity too high-end gamers who do not want to tinker over things. You can have it help low-end gamers to achieve playable frame rate even on low-end machines.
Game Stream is awesome I've been using an NVidia Shield to play Batman Arkham City using the GTX Titan in my desktop PC and then a very solid wireless router is required. It is amazing. PC grade graphics on a handheld or with their new console mode for shield you can stream to your TV at 720p or 1080 P with an upcoming patch that is coming later on.
The next up is shadow play. Right now supports local recording only, though twitch streaming integrated into your graphics card driver essentially is coming soon. Records at 60fps add up to 1080p, so it is better than most stand-alone hardware recorders and it can just record possibly in the background. you can actually retroactively grab up to 20 minutes of pre-recorded footage in Windows 8 using their passing shot or plain mode or you can have unlimited recording in manual mode. Now it is not perfect, it is like not perfect yet but I mean there is no OpenGL support, so no Minecraft, but it has very small file sizes and the quality looks great and it has a negligible less than 10 percent performance impact. Therefore, it is something that you can actually have running all the time, which is great compared to software recording like, fraps.
That is it for the tech, now on to performance. We ran our entire graphics card on our standard overclock 3960X test bench. All video cards were overclocked as usual. If you want stock benchmarks, a hundred other people do things like this online. About how we overclocked the graphics card or what frequencies we are running up, we recorded frame rates using fraps after giving each graphics card a few minutes to warm up in game.
Benchmarks:
Benchmarks:
This card really shows its prowess in the higher resolutions. This card is amazing and taking names but it definitely comes at a price tag.
