Test Setup and Errata
I am currently unable to do the frame rating/frame pacing testing that Ryan does. It simply costs a lot of money to get that setup. Instead, I have used the more traditional testing of FPS across multiple applications and benchmarks. In this context, it certainly does not invalidate these results. I do not test in SLI or CrossFire, which is where we see issues primarily crop up with frame rating. Ryan covers every new GPU with the frame rating suite, so if a reader is curious about those results, they can find them here.
I recently changed from the AMD test system to the Intel based i7 3770K. This CPU certainly pushes even high end graphics cards and gives us a better look at their theoretical performance. I also started testing in only 1920×1200 and 2560×1600. 1080P is the most common resolution that games are typically run in, due to the extreme affordability of 1080P panels.
I test the cards in a rather large case, instead of an open air workstation. I believe this is more representative of most usage scenarios, and the controlled airflow does provide positive results when it comes to thermals.
I also tested the three top end cards in Eyefinity/Surround. Resolution is set to 5760×1200 and the applications used are Skyrim, GRID 2, Battlefield 3, and Bioshock Infinity.
For comparative purposes I use the MSI Twin Frozr HD 7950 OC and the MSI R7970 Lightning.
Intel i7 3770K
Gigabyte G1 Sniper 3
GSkill 2 x 4GB DDR-3 1866
WD 1 TB Caviar Black HD
Lite-On BDR
Enermax Fulmo GT Case
Corsair AX1200 Power Supply
Windows 7 64 Bit
NVIDIA 320.18 Drivers
Catalyst 13.6 Beta 2
Results
I try to have a good balance of synthetic testing combined with real world results. I believe this is a good balance of what is theoretically possible with these chips vs. what we see in actual games. Let us start off with the synthetics first.
The fact that every card has
The fact that every card has a new cooler except for the GTX 770 really irritates me…
It is a new cooler on the GTX
It is a new cooler on the GTX 770, because the previous GTX 680 had the triple slot number. It is unfortunate that they did not update the shroud though to match those of the 780 and 760.
Great cards these GTX780
Great cards these GTX780 Direct CUs. I’ve been a little hasty on getting the MSI GTX690 reference card early this March (got a great discount on it though 🙂 . It’s not overclocked (for acoustic and temperature reasons), but on a 60Hz 1080p SAMSUNG monitor displays everything beautifully, with all eye-candy maxed out. Constant 60FPS with V-Sync on for great image quality – that is on every game I played so far. No need for overclocking yet! If I hadn’t bought this GTX690 beauty, I most definitely would have gone for ASUS’s GTX780. Thanks for this review, Josh. Great job. All the best!
PS: Might wanna check Min/Avg colour bars on Unigine Heaven benchmarks page.
I had just gotten one of
I had just gotten one of these card myself and I have had problems with it. It goes unresponsive. As soon as I put back in my gtx 680 no problems so i was wondering whether it was the card so i wend and returned it and the next one did the same thing. So I had my friend let me borrow his GTX 770 this was a EVGA version I put that thing in and I had absolutely no problems what soever so keep this in mind.