Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti review

[Administrator]

The performance lead in the GPU market tends to be Nvidia's to lose. By staying ahead of the curve technologically with architectures like Kepler, the cutting edge in GPU design is often held by the green corner, with the competition left to compete on value. However, the emergence of AMD's new high-end duo - the R9 290X and R290 - impacts this pattern of top-end dominance. Remarkably, both lead the tables for single GPU performance despite the latter selling for as little as £300, usurping both Titan and GTX 780 regardless of this disparity in cost. A quick response was needed, and in the Nvidia GTX 780 Ti edition, we have it - but at a launch price of around £550 this new product can't simply draw level; it must take a substantial lead to justify its immense price premium.
A quick look at the specs tells us that Nvidia is taking the resurgent AMD challenge seriously. GTX 780 and Titan were both based on Nvidia's GK110 chip, but each was pared back in its own ways. With the arrival of the 780 Ti, Nvidia has finally brought the full power of the chip to bear, meaning more performance than Titan, but with the most substantial gains found when compared with the vanilla GTX 780. The core clock rises from 863MHz to 876MHz, while GPU Boost has shifted from 876MHz to 928MHz when power and temperatures allow. These are relatively minor tweaks in the grand scheme, but it's just one part of the equation - more importantly, we get a huge jump to 2880 stream processors and 240 texture units.
Additionally, there's the crucial matter of RAM: the card's memory clock gets bumped to a phenomenal 7GHz effective, where its predecessor ran at just over 6GHz. Despite a smaller 384-bit memory bus, and the lesser 3GB GDDR5 capacity compared to its 512-bit and 4GB-sized AMD competition, the 780 Ti still manages to deliver the fastest bandwidth in the field at 336GB/s (compared to the 320GB/s of the 290X). Through this, the floodgates are opened for gaming at resolutions far beyond 1080p, though the question remains whether this is sufficient for fluid 4K gameplay.
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