The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Review
by Ryan Smith on November 7, 2013 9:01 AM ESTMeet The GeForce GTX 780 Ti
When it comes to the physical design and functionality of the GTX 780 Ti, to no surprise NVIDIA is sticking with what works. The design of the GTX Titan and its associated cooler have proven themselves twice over now between the GTX Titan and the GTX 780, so with only the slightest of changes this is what NVIDIA is going with for GTX 780 Ti, too. Consequently there’s very little new material to cover here, but we’ll quickly hit the high points before recapping the general design of what has now become the GTX 780 series.
The biggest change here is that GTX 780 Ti is the first NVIDIA launch product to feature the new B1 revision of their GK110 GPU. B1 has already been shipping for a couple of months now, so GTX 780 Ti isn’t the first card to get this new GPU. However while GTX Titan and GTX 780 products currently contain a mix of the old and new revisions as NVIDIA completes the change-over, GTX 780 Ti will be B1 (and only B1) right out the door.
As for what’s new for B1, NVIDIA is telling us that it’s a fairly tame revision of GK110. NVIDIA hasn’t made any significant changes to the GPU, rather they’ve merely gone in and fixed some errata that were in the earlier revision of GK110, and in the meantime tightened up the design and leakage just a bit to nudge power usage down, the latter of which is helpful for countering the greater power draw from lighting up the 15th and final SMX. Otherwise B1 doesn’t have any feature changes nor significant changes in its power characteristics relative to the previous revision, so it should be a fairly small footnote compared to GTX 780.
The other notable change coming with GTX 780 Ti is that NVIDIA has slightly adjusted the default temperature throttle point, increasing it from 80C to 83C. The difference in cooling efficiency itself will be trivial, but since NVIDIA is using the exact same fan curve on the GTX 780 Ti as they did the GTX 780, the higher temperature throttle effectively increases the card’s equilibrium point, and therefore the average fan speed under load. Or put another way, but letting it get a bit warmer the GTX 780 Ti will ramp up its fan a bit more and throttle a bit less, which should help offset the card’s increased power consumption while also keeping thermal throttling minimized.
| GeForce GTX 780 Series Temperature Targets | ||||
| GTX 780 Ti Temp Target | GTX 780 Temp Target | GTX Titan Temp Target | ||
| 83C | 80C | 80C | ||
Moving on, since the design of the GTX 780 Ti is a near carbon copy of GTX 780, we’re essentially looking at GTX 780 with better specs and new trimmings. NVIDIA’s very effective (and still quite unique) metallic GTX Titan cooler is back, this time featuring black lettering and a black tinted window. As such GTX 780 Ti remains a 10.5” long card composed of a cast aluminum housing, a nickel-tipped heatsink, an aluminum baseplate, and a vapor chamber providing heat transfer between the GPU and the heatsink. The end result is the GTX 780 Ti is a quiet card despite the fact that it’s a 250W blower design, while still maintaining the solid feel and eye-catching design that NVIDIA has opted for with this generation of cards.
Drilling down, the PCB is also a re-use from GTX 780. It’s the same GK110 GPU mounted on the same PCB with the same 6+2 phase power design. This being despite the fact that GTX 780 Ti features faster 7GHz memory, indicating that NVIDIA was able to hit their higher memory speed targets without making any obvious changes to the PCB or memory trace layouts. Meanwhile the reuse of the power delivery subsystem is a reflection of the fact that GTX 780 Ti has the same 250W TDP limit as GTX 780 and GTX Titan, though unlike those two cards GTX 780 Ti will have the least headroom to spare and will come the closest to hitting it, due to the general uptick in power requirements from having 15 active SMXes. Finally, using the same PCB also means that GTX 780 has the same 6pin + 8pin power requirement and the same display I/O configuration of 2x DL-DVI, 1x HDMI, 1x DisplayPort 1.2.
On a final note, for custom cards NVIDIA won’t be allowing custom cards right off the bat – everything today will be a reference card – but with NVIDIA’s partners having already put together their custom GK110 designs for GTX 780, custom designs for GTX 780 Ti will come very quickly. Consequently, expect most (if not all of them) to be variants of their existing custom GTX 780 designs.
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Hrel - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
You talk about Titan as still being plausible as a compute card, yet the AMD cards, all of them, outperform both the Titan and the 780ti. Then the 780ti out performs the Titan. Nvidia beats itself here; and AMD beats them by a massive margin. Then you throw in the fact that Nvidia is essentially not even trying to compete on a price/performance basis and all of a sudden buying an Nvidia card makes absolutely no sense.Honestly I'm happy about this. I can't buy AMD CPU's since Intel so completely wallops them; but now, finally, I have no excuse to recommend any GPU except an AMD GPU. Good on ya folks, hopefully your CPU department starts firing on all cylinders like this.
Galatian - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
I might not be an expert but I keep wondering what these new chips from AMD and Nvidia mean for their next generation? Clearly bringing out this full featured chips (which were once only supposed to be sold as workstation graphic chips) because 22nm keeps being delayed, will put pressure on their next chips. For example I guess the 780 chips are at the performance level Nvidia probably targeted Maxwell at. Maybe they are now pushed into releasing a full blown Maxwell chip to begin with.TheJian - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
This ^^^ Excellent that both have set the bar so much higher now. Realistically though it shouldn't be hard to top with the die shrink. It's just that they will not be able to give us such a gimped card at launch of 20nm for either side, saving a ton for refresh. They will be forced to give us something semi-real out of the gate :) I can't wait for maxwell 20nm. AMD will have to produce an awesome chip (like if AMD goes all out, low watts/heat/noise, 20% faster than NV basically like reverse of 780ti vs. 290x) in order for me to not want Gsync. No lag, stutter, tearing is worth a ton to me.http://wccftech.com/alleged-nvidia-maxwell-archite...
If this is true, AMD better have some good stuff up their sleeve. 6144 cuda cores? Plus all the other enhancements would be potent. I don't believe this though. Even with a die shrink it would seemingly be a HUGE die but too lazy to do that math right now to see how plausible and too far away...LOL. I could believe 4608 though with 6 GPC/18SMX/256alu's and 6144 maybe held for 16nm/14nm or something.
AngelOfTheAbyss - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
The difference between Titan and the 780 cards is the FP64 performance (1/3 vs 1/24 FP32),Using 64bit (double precision) floating point operations simplifies a lot of things when implementing numerical algorithms. If you use 32bit (single precision) operations, you often have to resort to some numerical skulduggery to get the desired accuracy.
TheJian - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Quit looking at sites like Anandtech/Toms that don't show much CUDA perf. Quit looking at OPENCL crap on Nvidia (only a retard buys NV cards and doesn't run CUDA whenever they have a job that can be done with a CUDA app or an app that has a Cuda plugin!). None of the crap running here would be done on Titan. You wouldn't run Sony Vegas either which has tons of issues running nvidia (google it, vegas cuda - badabing bad idea to buy this app for NV go ADOBE). You'd buy an Adobe lic like the rest of the world for Photos or Video editing and you'd turn on Cuda.I'll bet EVERY penny and object I own that they will run adobe the second AMD gets OpenCL in it (which is coming)...ROFL. How much does AMD pay this site? ;) They won't run AMD vs. NV in adobe until then. Of course if someone else shows it sucks still even after optimizing the upcoming revs of adobe apps, I guess they won't do it even then ;)
Ask Anandtech why they don't run Cuda vs. AMD (in anything, amd can usually go OpenCL, DirectX or OpenGL in the same apps that use Cuda). You can run any pro app and pick luxrender for AMD and say, Octane/furryball etc for NV, yet anandtech refuses. Or just run adobe and choose cuda for nv and OpenGL for AMD. You can do Adobe tests with a freaking trial download.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-workstati...
Look at that and the next 3 pages of cuda benchmarks and marvel as a $1000 card (titan) blows away $2000-$5000 cards (W6000 etc).
Tomshardware does the same crap as anandtech. Note they say "NOT SUPPORTED" for all cuda benchmarks. But all they have to do is use LUXRENDER for all of them and pit them head to head with Cuda. I've asked many times why they do this for all the benchmarks in their forums and they NEVER have responded...ROFL. Why do they run any OpenCL benchmark on NV at either site? Run some real stuff like Adobe AMD vs NV. The world uses premiere and photoshop (largely).
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-78...
marvel now as 780TI blows away the same cards $2000+ and nearly does it 2x faster than most...LOL. Understand? But why is AMD not included?
3dsmax+iray (run luxrender for AMD).
Blender 2.66 (run luxrender for AMD).
Why tomshardware why?...ROFL. They read here too ;)
OctaneRender™ for...
ArchiCAD Cinema4D, Inventor, Maya, Revit, Softimage, 3ds Max, Blender, Daz Studio, Lightwave, Poser, Rhino (sketchup & carrara, autocad etc coming soon)
Luxrender:
3dsmax, lightwave3d, blender, dazstudio, poser, cinema4d, softimage, sketchup & carrara
See how they overlap? Lux for AMD vs. Octane for NV. simple. But that would show how weak AMD is and how strong cuda is after 7yrs and billions in development ;) Heck pit any plugin you want for AMD vs. NV Cuda. Cuda is available for the top 200 apps but anandtech/tomshardware seem to be incapable of running them against each other. Well, anandtech does have an AMD portal page...LOL. :) Just saying...You should never run LUX with NVidia. Run LUX vs. Octane! Pick an app above and run both plugins against each other for AMD/NV. Simple. I understand hating on Cuda for being proprietary, but these two sites ignoring it and acting like NV is slow due to opencl is ridiculous and misleading.
Instead of the above, Anandtech runs luxmark (pick an app, use plugins instead of dumb opencl benchmark which highlights ONLY AMD), sony vegas (pit it against Adobe/Cuda/premiere easy to render the same vid in both), CLbenchmark? ROFL....How about something we can make money with instead of this fake crap? At least show the other side:
http://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/physx-fluidmark/
Which runs on both AMD and NV. Fluidmark:
"This benchmark exploits OpenGL for graphics acceleration and requires an OpenGL 2.0 compliant graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 5/6/7/8/9/GTX200 (and higher), AMD/ATI Radeon 9600+, 1k/2k/3k/4k (and higher) or a S3 Graphics Chrome 400 series."
Folding@home can't make you a dime either...waste of time testing this. You like high electric bills for warm fuzzy feelings? Not me. Think some pill company will pay you to solve cancer? NOPE.
Syscompute+AMP crap home made benchmark to suit AMD? No thanks...Can't make me a dime. NOT REAL. Doesn't anyone find it strange Anandtech only runs ONE thing (sony vegas) that can actually be used to make money? And it sucks on NV when Adobe rocks. What the heck is going on here? Nobody at anandtech knows how to use Adobe products?
"Last, in our C++ AMP benchmark we see the GTX 780 Ti take the top spot for an NVIDIA card, but like so many of our earlier compute tests it will come up short versus AMD’s best cards."
LOL...Gee, maybe if you actually ran some REAL STUFF and pit AMD vs. NV (CUDA..DUH!) we'd find out some truth ;) What are you afraid of anandtech? I guess I should just paste this into every article with OpenCL benchmarks here ;) Maybe if they start losing even more traffic (down since 660ti article last sept, about in half, worse since AMD portal probably and AMD personal visit to ONLY this site...LOL), they will start telling it like it is and start running cuda vs. AMD.
FYI Titan has full DP and 6GB. Come back and say that junk when you try to render something big. Come back when anandtech starts running CUDA vs. AMD. Until then, quit drinking anandtech/amd koolaide ;)
hero4hire - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Hail corporate!Cuda!!
Whatever you're getting paid needs to get cut for each ;) LOL ROFL and CAPS!!!! You're not being taken seriously when you sound like a 14 girl texting their bffs
Hail corporate!
SBTech86 - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
nvidia thinks we r dumbgordon151 - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Would they be wrong :)?firewall597 - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Did you even read this review? CF pooped all over SLI in most scenarios.jigglywiggly - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
why are the benchmarks not including any older cards? even a 670...