Old thread, new experience. I have been going back and forth between dual a Titan PC and a Dual 780 PC. (I wont buy anymore TI cards after getting burned with the 680TI incompatibility / reliability in games issue).
This has been an interesting learning experience I would share to contribute to the debate. For reasons of my own I often have 2 or even 3 gaming PCs in the house. Because I am a bit of a hardware / benching enthusiast and have a lot of friends from home (I live outside my home country (England) and my friends come over a lot and we all game too.
Perhaps the drivers are different now or something as I keep seeing 836MHZ Titans mentioned in reviews. My Titans run at 876 as standard and I have them locked to 915 (ASUS). (They default to 876).
I have the 780s (MSI) at 960.
Both seem happy and stable and I could probably bump either up more but don't' feel the need to push my luck.
I game in 2560 x 1600 or 2560 x 1440 at present mostly but have a 4k TV I have been playing with resulting in a plan to get 4k monitors when I see less people complaining about compatibility issues.
I often mod. This is a key factor for me. In Skyrim for example I have something like 20-30 Gig of Mods kicking around. A good proportion of these are all the 4k texture pack and other visual upgrades. If I keep the same machine and simply reinstall the different cards Skyrim will crash regularly after easily hitting the 3gb per card limit on the normal 780s. When running the Titans' I do not have the same issue and the game is stable. Note, you dont necessarily need to have a 4k monitor to appreciate the improvement from 4k texture packs. They look great on 2560x1440 to. Perhaps lower, I dont know. So I need framerates to match high htz refresh rates (I also hacked the monitor refresh rates to make them customisable but still, what would be the point of going back to old 60 hz. I like anything from 80-90 up and one monitor runs at 120 hz anyway. But for me, the framerate is one thing, texture memory is a brick wall. A card can slow down or speed up dynamically, if it hits a texture limit all hell breaks loose. Or normally, the game just crashes or the entire PC.
I wont go into detail there are modding forums and calculators for specific games which support modding which hi light when one might hit a problem but I have seen it for myself and it is very real and very annoying. The 780s are hitting it in some configurations for some games I play and it really infuriates me. I do not like compromise much. I just want the best I can get for the best experience possible. I dont want to be sold nor buy something like a fool because some manufacturer or another makes me a marketing victim but I do value real world experience. So this was mine for those in a similar position.
BF4 can also push the memory limitations in high resolutions and this can cause crashes (this has been independently verified in a lab far more scientific than my own meandering rambling opinion) if you go all out with textures and my experience is that I see a better gaming experience generally on the titans in terms of smoother less glitchy gaming than I do on the 780s. So the Titans are better for me. I do not like that they are 1000 Euros. I don't really see how that is justified but I paid it because I suspected I would get an advantage and I got what I paid for.
Now I have to use a car analogy just because so many do. You can buy some sort of modded boy racer turbo thingy with nice lights on it which will run at screaming revs and go really fast giving you bang for your bucks perhaps. Or you can buy a V8 or V12 and skip the after market Turbo and stuff which just seems to cause potential issues later. You might see some kid in a 15k car beat your 100k car off the lights for a short while, but in the mean, the same guy that buys the 100k V12 version of something will not then take it to the shop to buy an aftermarket mod for it to boost it and win next time. He just has nothing to prove and is having a better driving experience for the other 23.9 hours of his driving day. This is a pretty crap analogy but I am jumping on the usual car analogy bandwagon and couldn't think of a better one.
I see some variation in frame rate but surprisingly little. Different scenes or zones seem to have different effects on each card. Its so close that overall, I cant really make a call on which is better yet other than an unscientific impression that the Titans feel much smoother and seem to be less stressed at the resolutions I like doing the things I want to do. If I wanted low rez. I game on a PC because I like the higher resolutions and modding so far me, though I am no pro animator etc. I still tend to gravitate towards the Titans if I had a preference. However, the fact is I don't really because in some cases the choice is taken away from me such as using a massively modded skyrim. One can get to hung up on reviews and like anything else, they are about a single card on the test bed and a snap shot of that particular piece of hardware. Its not the whole story. The whole story is, what are you most happy using.
Personally, I don't game in 3D. I find it gives me a massive headache similar to when I game on consoles. Though on my old consoles it was the aspect ration (that feeling your playing while looking through someones letterbox). But I wonder what difference we would see. Framerate variation is often overlooked in gaming but as anyone that plays something like BF4 will know. Variations in framerate between one minute and the next can be very disorienting and damn annoying and I also see less frame variation on the Titans. Perhaps this is because I got lucky with these 2 boards or because of the resolution I game at and the higher memory being an advantage. Alll round I am getting the better experience I paid for. Not sure its worth twice the price for most. Do feel a little disadvantaged about the price differential. Would have been happier buying all 780s with 6gb but I didnt seem to have that choice at the time.
People are so quick to judge just because a product looks expensive to them or may be not from their perspective seem useful. Worth remembering their are many people that work on the same machine they game on, can use the extra compute power (perhaps they are hacking and cracking) or like me just have a really legitimate gaming reason to want to try the other option.
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