nVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Pro Reviews

Astoundingly powerful - you'll have no problem playing the latest games

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti is undoubtedly an impressive performer. It speeds past the GeForce GTX Titan, despite that card’s higher $1,000 asking price, and overall it delivers the best performance we’ve seen from a single-chip graphics card. At least as important, it manages these performance feats while running fairly cool and quiet compared to AMD’s Radeon R9 290X, which is designed to run at up to 95 degrees Celsius (203 degrees Fahrenheit). Because of this, AMD’s card has a tendency to throttle back a bit when running at the most extreme settings (say, when it's pushing three screens or a 4K display), unless you flip its BIOS switch to activate the card's noisy Uber mode and keep its GPU cool. Nvidia’s card doesn’t have that problem. It’s powerful without getting roaring loud, no matter how hard you push it. It also looks nicer than AMD’s cards, thanks to its metal shell. If you care about acoustics and maximum frame rates, this is the single card you want here in late 2013. That being said, AMD’s Radeon R9 290X is nearly as fast, and on some tests it's faster, so long as you're willing to put up with its turbofan. And, at least when we wrote this in mid-November 2013, the Radeon R9 290X was $150 less than the GeForce GTX 780 Ti. Given that big a price difference, we suspect many gamers will be willing to put up with some extra fan noise and heat. After all, $150 can buy a heck of a gaming headset.

Desirability is something the Radeon cards, with their toy-town plastic shrouds and noisy fans, just don't have. They may be quick and fantastic value, but where the vast majority of gamers were desperate to get their mitts on a Titan they'll now be after a GTX 780 Ti. Those people wont have changed their targets to either of the more-affordable, but almost-as-quick Radeons.

The GTX 780 Ti is everything we expected and more. It is extremely fast, consumes less power than the R9 290X and remains whisper quiet regardless of how much load you put it under. That’s a noteworthy achievement for NVIDIA in the face of an odd push towards justifying overly loud acoustics in favor of performance. Currently, there isn’t a better card available for gamers who don’t want to buy a water block or custom heatsink to ensure optimal framerates.

Beyond its performance, GeForce GTX 780 Ti is more efficient than Titan thanks to tightly-binned GK110B GPUs that come fully-enabled, operate at higher frequencies, and yet are rated for the same 250 W TDP. As a result, this is a quiet card. It elegantly blows waste heat out of its I/O bracket. And the board looks good. We know that thermal solution isn’t cheap, but it’s the reason Nvidia keeps gathering praise for its design, while everyone looks forward to third-party board vendors replacing AMD’s reference effort. GeForce GTX 780 Ti isn’t perfect. Priced at $700, it’s a bargain compared to Titan. But it’s not a bargain given the competition (after all, we already know what it takes to make R9 290X and 290 run faster). Nvidia does handicap the card’s FP64 performance for purposes of segmentation. However, AMD’s doing that now as well with its Hawaii-based boards. Perhaps the biggest issue enthusiasts will find with 780 Ti is memory capacity. Titan ships with 6 GB of GDDR5, while AMD includes 4 GB on its $550 Radeon R9 290X and $400 290. In today’s games, and at resolutions as high as 3840x2160, 780 Ti’s 3 GB should be sufficient. However, it’s already possible to punch above that in Battlefield 4 using three 2560x1440 monitors. When you’re sinking serious coin on ultra-high-end hardware, future-proofing is an important consideration.

When it comes to performance, the card is a beast, and it really has to hurt anyone who bought a GTX TITAN for $999. As much of a beast that card was, the price tag was always painful. The performance of the new GTX 780 Ti 3GB is really quite exceptional, though, and you can see against our MSI GTX 780 3GB Lightning, which is overclocked to over 1000MHz on the core, more often than not, the new Ti variant manages to perform ahead of it. The new GTX 780 Ti 3GB competes against the AMD R9 290X 4GB in the sense that it's AMD's top single GPU model against NVIDIA's top single GPU model. But with over $100 separating the two cards and more than $200 separating them when you're talking about CrossFire or SLI, there's a decent price gap between the two cards. It's really enough that the NVIDIA offering could just simply not be in your budget.

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 780 Ti successfully captures the single GPU performance crown back from AMD. The card delivers impressive performance thanks to the GK110 GPU which has all its 2,880 shaders enabled. Averaged over all our benchmarks, performance is almost 10% higher than the GTX Titan and 8% higher than the R9 290X in its noisy "Uber" mode. The performance gap is 13% versus the R9 290X in quiet mode, or the R9 290, and the card even manages these performance levels with minimal throttling. Some investigation yielded an average clock rate of 993 MHz, which means that, thanks to NVIDIA GPU Boost 2.0, the card always stays well above NVIDIA's guaranteed 876 MHz the card will never go below. On AMD's R9 290 Series, we've seen major clock drops from time to time, depending on the heat situation, dropping the card below 700 MHz in some cases, though it is officially specified to run at "up to 1000 MHz."

The 780 Ti has proven to be an obscenely powerful performer with ability to spare, all while staying cool and quiet.

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.

There's no doubt the GTX 780 Ti is fast and delivers smooth-as-silk gameplay. At $699, it is taking over the price point of the GTX 780 and is still $300 less than the GTX Titan. To make this price point more attractive, NVIDIA is sweetening the pot from October 28 through December 31 if you buy a GTX 780 Ti. A trio of AAA game will be included from e-tailers, including Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Batman: Arkham Origins, and Splinter Cell: Blacklist; all topped off with a voucher for $100 off an NVIDIA SHIELD. If you are looking for the next best thing, it's here and it's called the GTX 780 Ti.

Right now a single GTX 780 Ti has a solid lead over a single 290X, but a pair of GTX 780 Tis is going to tie with a pair of cheaper 290Xs at 4K resolutions. And with 290X’s frame pacing under control NVIDIA no longer has that advantage to help build their case. GTX 780 Ti still has other advantages – power and noise in particular – but it does mean we’re in an interesting situation where NVIDIA can claim the single-GPU performance crown while the crown for the dual-GPU victor remains up for grabs. It's still very early in the game for 4K and NVIDIA isn't under any great pressure, but it will be an area of improvement for the next generation when Maxwell arrives in 2014.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti video card is the World’s fastest single GPU powered card