Endmost Thoughts: Performance vs. Price

Let united states share a little something with you. Information technology'due south been a busy couple of days for the states as we had a full plate testing and covering the GeForce GTX 780 launch just besides the OCZ Vertex 450 and AMD's A4-5000 Kabini platform (AMD review goes alive Friday). Worse still, we got our GTX 780 review sample a mere 24 hours before T time.

As a result we were merely able to test half as many games as we normally would. Nevertheless nosotros picked half-dozen flagship games, testing frame rate functioning along average fps, and then overall we were able to get a pretty skilful picture of what the GeForce GTX 780 is all about.

On average nosotros found the GeForce GTX 780 to exist 24% faster than the GTX 680 and xvi% faster than the Radeon Hd 7970 GHz Edition when measuring frame rate operation. It was also just 14% slower than the GTX Titan and 29% slower than the GTX 690.

The frame time operation was a chip dissimilar as the GeForce GTX 780 was just 12% faster than the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, but still 24% faster than the GTX 680 and ten% slower than the GTX Titan. Those figures certainly make the GeForce GTX 780 expect pretty powerful and these are the kind of gains we would usually expect from a adjacent-generation product that is showcasing a brand new architecture.

The big question is how much will the GTX 780 sell for?

The answer will probably disappoint many of you lot because at $650, information technology'due south not exactly affordable even for a high-end graphics menu. Non wanting to kickoff a new pricing war with AMD or forcing themselves to drop pricing of the GTX 600 series, Nvidia has set the GTX 700 series to fit in with what is currently bachelor.

The driving force backside this decision has likely been the success of the GTX Titan which in three months has already outsold the year old GTX 690.

At $650 the GTX 780 is 35% cheaper than the GTX Titan but 38% more than than the GTX 680, which can be easily found selling for $470. Since the GTX 780 was only 20 - 24% faster than the GTX 680 based on our frame rate and frame fourth dimension results, that doesn't make it a candidate for any value awards. Forgoing percentage comparisons, the GTX 780 could be seen as a Titan-esque GPU that happens to exist several hundreds cheaper.

On the other hand, looking back into history those $500 GPUs were already considered expensive and unremarkably reserved for a select group of hardcore gamers. Under those terms, the GTX 780 is inappreciably heady news for the vast majority of gamers as the $650 price tag makes this new GPU unobtainable and it'll do nothing to drive prices of previous generation cards downward. Mayhap next week'southward launch of the GTX 770 will be a little more than meaningful for the gaming community.

Pros: Titan-esque GPU with a nigh equally imposing feature set and performance. Future-proof gaming graphics menu, 384-fleck wide memory passenger vehicle, 2304 CUDA cores and 3GB retentiveness buffer.

Cons: Next-gen GPU doesn't replace its predecessor, makes you pay for the performance boost.