I explained a lot of the methodology we’re using in AMD Radeon HD 7990: Eight Games And A Beastly Card For $1,000. But again, our GeForce GTX 780 review is going to have a lot of data to comb over.

As we might expect, the GeForce GTX 780 falls in just behind Nvidia’s GeForce GTX Titan. In that context, the $650 card offers quite a bit more value at its price point than the flagship. However, AMD’s $450 Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition board isn’t far behind either, outpacing the more expensive GeForce GTX 680.
What’s going on with the Radeon HD 7990? Well, if we were to believe our hardware-based numbers, AMD’s dual-GPU beast would be the winner in this benchmark. But after we remove dropped and runt frames from the analysis, one of the card’s GPUs appears to be doing very little useful work, yielding a frame rate you can actually see just above a single Radeon HD 7970.

Here’s what that average frame rate chart looks like plotted over time. Although we illustrated hardware and practical performance last time, we’re cleaning the data up as much as possible, giving you just the numbers that matter: practical frame rate.
Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 780, in red, trails the Titan ever so slightly, just ahead of the Radeon HD 7970, but far more consistent than the Radeon HD 7990.

Our attempts to simplify result in a less complex frame time variance chart, too. As a reminder, this is a reflection of the latency between consecutive frames, not the absolute time it takes to render a frame. Rather than average, 75th, and 95th percentile numbers, we have the average and 99th (worst-case) results.
On average, none of those cards are terrible in Battlefield 3. Based on the real-world experiential stuff I’ve done with gamers, it seems like 5 ms of difference is the point where folks start consistently picking the card with lower variance over the other. Conversely, we see that the Radeon HD 7990 can get pretty bad when we look at the entire run, minus the worst 1%. We already know this, though—until AMD can work out its multi-GPU pacing issues, examples like this should give gamers a moment of pause about spending $1,000 on a Radeon HD 7990.
- GK110 Gets A Little Bit Leaner
- GeForce GTX 780: The Card
- GeForce Experience And ShadowPlay
- GPU Boost 2.0 And Troubleshooting Overclocking
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Single-Card Results: Battlefield 3
- Single-Card Results: BioShock Infinite
- Single-Card Results: Borderlands 2
- Single-Card Results: Crysis 3
- Single-Card Results: Far Cry 3
- Single-Card Results: Hitman: Absolution
- Single-Card Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
- Single-Card Results: Tomb Raider
- Multi-GPU Results: Battlefield 3
- Multi-GPU Results: BioShock Infinite
- Multi-GPU Results: Borderlands 2
- Multi-GPU Results: Crysis 3
- Multi-GPU Results: Far Cry 3
- Multi-GPU Results: Hitman: Absolution
- Multi-GPU Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
- Multi-GPU Results: Tomb Raider
- Heat, Noise, And Cooling
- Power Consumption And GPU Boost
- OpenGL: 2D And 3D Performance
- DirectX And CAD: 2D And 3D Performance
- CUDA Performance
- OpenCL: Single-Precision
- OpenCL: Double-Precision
- GeForce GTX 780: Another GK110-Based Card For Wealthy Gamers
Of course, one could argue that as we get closer to higher-end products, the performance increase is always minimal and price to performance ratio starts to increase, however, for the past 3-4 years (or so I guess), never has it been that the 2nd highest-end GPU having such low performance difference with the highest-end GPU. It's usually significant enough that the highest end GPU (GTX x80) still has it's place.
Tl;dr,
The GTX Titan was released to make the GTX 780 look incredibly good, and people (especially on the internet), will spread the news fast enough claiming the $650 release price for the GTX 780 is good and reasonable, and people who didn't even bother reading reviews and benchmarks, will take their word and pay the premium for GTX 780.
Nvidia is taking a different route to compete with AMD or one could say that they're not even trying to compete with AMD in terms of price/performance (at least for the high-end products).
Of course, one could argue that as we get closer to higher-end products, the performance increase is always minimal and price to performance ratio starts to increase, however, for the past 3-4 years (or so I guess), never has it been that the 2nd highest-end GPU having such low performance difference with the highest-end GPU. It's usually significant enough that the highest end GPU (GTX x80) still has it's place.
Tl;dr,
The GTX Titan was released to make the GTX 780 look incredibly good, and people (especially on the internet), will spread the news fast enough claiming the $650 release price for the GTX 780 is good and reasonable, and people who didn't even bother reading reviews and benchmarks, will take their word and pay the premium for GTX 780.
Nvidia is taking a different route to compete with AMD or one could say that they're not even trying to compete with AMD in terms of price/performance (at least for the high-end products).
Thats apretty bad analogy. A gpu is still smooth even with some of the cores/vram/etc turned off, it doesn't increase latency/frametimes/etc.
I must've missed something. Why wait a week?
Probably to get the GTX 770 launch into the picture, and maybe price cuts from AMD.
That was my opinion after I read Anandtech's review.
Not all is right at nvidia and this is just desperate times for desperate measures stuff, we now await AMD's response and if they play it right and make the node jump it could end up being very ugly.
but i don't know why people are complaining about the price because nvidia had no good competition for it at the moment and when they do they will have to reduce it
GK110 isn't a new anything. It's been around as long as the GTX 680 aka GK104 and is still part of the Kepler family. I think the new cards you're thinking of that are due sometime next year (maybe?) are the Maxwell family of cards.
I still maintain that this is what the 680 should have been a year ago, but I've beaten that horse to death too many times so I'll shut up...
No, if I meant Maxwell I would have said Maxwell. GTX 700 is GK110 but in the long and short Nvidia talked this up to be an almighty part yet we are only talking about 20% faster than the aging 7970. So now we wait for AMD's response which may still be some time yet.
I'd rather save $200+ and get a 7970GE. If Nvidia really wants to be aggressive they need to sell this for ~$550.
Granted, the price difference between this and Titan is ridiculously, making it a no-brainer purchase. Not for me though. Not upgrading from two 670s yet, hehe.