Pricing Comparisons and Closing Thoughts

So the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti is a force to be reckoned with, there is little debate of that.  But the question is how it will be received by an enthusiast gaming community that has seen more than its share of new graphics card releases and price drops in the last 40 days.

 

Performance

The new GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3GB takes back the crown and title of the fastest single GPU graphics card on the market.  It does this with a full GK110 powering it, 2,880 CUDA cores running at a base clock higher than the original GTX 780 AND has a GDDR5 memory bus running at 7.0 Gbps.  All of this adds up to performance that is beating out the GTX 780 (non-Ti), the GTX TITAN and the Radeon R9 290X.

The reign of the R9 290X at the top of the mountain was rather short lived, but in reality we expected a quick reaction from NVIDIA.  AMD's Hawaii GPU surprised us all with its ability to outpace the GTX 780 (at the time $100 more expensive) as well as the GTX TITAN (at the time $450 more!).  But NVIDIA was willing to sacrifice the GTX TITAN as the flagship gaming option in order to produce a card that could perform better than the 290X, while being reasonably close in cost. 

In my testing, the GTX 780 Ti was able to maintain a 10-15% performance advantage over the R9 290X in our most demanding games at 2560×1440 and 3840×2160.  Results at 1920×1080 were much closer though if you are gaming on a graphics card like this on a standard 1080p panel, you are doing it wrong quite frankly.  Sorry.  A couple of games, like Bioshock Infinite and GRID 2, showed reasonably close performance between the AMD and NVIDIA flaghips however, so the win wasn't a total slam dunk for the 780 Ti.

Clearly, the GTX 780 Ti puts the GTX TITAN in a much different light.  Buyers focused on gaming should pass by the $999 TITAN and jump to the GTX 780 Ti.  The only saving grace for TITAN, and this is something NVIDIA is clearly okay with, is the double precision performance that will appeal to GPU compute fans and users looking for lower cost Tesla alternatives.  Add in the fact that the performance gap between the GTX 780 and GTX 780 Ti is big enough to measure and you can see why NVIDIA is comfortable with the $699 price tag.

If we compare SLI and CrossFire, the advantage here still lies with the NVIDIA's multi-GPU solution.  CrossFire has been improved dramatically since we first found problems with frame pacing this year but it still has room to get better.  NVIDIA's pacing technology is more refined and produces results that are much more consistent (with Bioshock Infinite as the only outlier).   

Pricing and Availability

According to NVIDIA, the GeForce GTX 780 Ti should be available today with expanded availability starting next week.

UPDATE: Looks like the GTX 780 Ti cards are already starting to show up on Amazon.

At $699, the GTX 780 Ti is cheap by no one's standards but does offer a significant performance advantage over both the GTX 780 and the R9 290X options.  Does the GTX 780 Ti offer $150 worth of additional performance compared to the AMD Hawaii flagship?  Or even the closely competing R9 290 that sells for $399? 

If you consider the game bundle which includes Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Batman Arkham Origins and Assassin's Creed IV, and maybe even the $100 discount you can get on an NVIDIA SHIELD, the value of the GTX 780 Ti does go up.  Based purely on retail value the GTX 780 Ti minus the cost of the three games does equal $550 or so; the same price as the R9 290X.

Final Thoughts

NVIDIA has once again come into the enthusiast market and built the fastest GPU we have ever tested.  It does make some sacrifices along the way this time; it's louder and hotter and more power hungry than any single GeForce GPU before it.  But that seems mostly a response to AMD's direction in those same areas.  The GeForce GTX 780 Ti doesn't use as much power, get as hot or make as much noise as the R9 290X though and you can be damned sure that isn't an accident.  And because the Kepler GK110 GPU is able to produce better performance, sometimes by 15% or more, simply shows that NVIDIA continues to have an architecture worth bragging about.

It doesn't take the super aggressive stance in performance per dollar that AMD went with on the Hawaii release, but if you have $699 and want the fastest GPU you can buy, the GeForce GTX 780 Ti is the only option.

 

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