Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti revealed to take on AMD’s Radeonn R9 290X
With 2,880 CUDA cores, 3GB of fast 7Gbit/s graphics memory and high clock speeds, Nvidia claims the GeForce GTX 780 Ti is "the most powerful gaming GPU on the planet."
Nvidia has announced the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, a graphics card intended to take on and beat the mighty Radeon R9 290X for the title of best gaming graphics card. Armed with a powerful GK110 Kepler graphics processor, 3GB of fast 7Gbit/s GDDR5 RAM and 2,880 CUDA cores (25 per cent more CUDA cores than the GeForce GTX 780), the GTX 780 Ti is certainly exciting.
The GTX 780 Ti runs at a stock clock speed of 875Mhz but can boost up to 928MHz. Even better, the GTX 780 Ti benefits from Nvidia’s GPU Boost 2.0 technology, which the company claims will keep the GTX 780 Ti running consistently at higher clock speeds for longer.
However, Nvidia insists modern gamers demand more than supremely quick GPUs and says the GTX 780 Ti will be more power efficient and quiet than the Radeon R9 290X thanks to the GTX 780 Ti’s 250W TDP and lower thermal density. Nvidia claims the card’s lower thermal density results in an operating temperature of 83 degrees Celcius under load, which means lower fan speeds are needed to cool the GTX 780 Ti’s GPU. Lower fan speeds mean a quieter fan.
The GTX 780 Ti also benefits from improved power balancing, which is likely to please overclocking enthusiasts. Overclocking can unbalance the power delivery from the card’s two PCI-E connectors and from the PCI-E bus, drawing maximum power from one source and reducing the maximum overclock you can apply. The GTX 780 Ti can automatically balance the power input so that no power source reaches maximum output prematurely, allowing higher overclocks. Nvidia claims the new power balancing feature should let you overclock the GTX 780 Ti even further than the GTX Titan and original GTX 780.
In benchmark results released by Nvidia, the GTX 780 Ti is shown to outperform the Radeon R9 290X by 26 per cent in Battlefield 4 with the game running at a resolution of 2,560×1,600, 4x anti-aliasing, 16x anisotropic filtering and with Ultra graphics quality.
The GeForce GTX 780 Ti’s manufacturer suggested retail price (MSRP) is £559 including VAT, making it much more expensive than the Radeon R9 290X. However, if the GTX 780 Ti performs as well as Nvidia claims then the extra cost may well be worth paying. The GeForce GTX 780 Ti also comes with three free games to sweeten the deal: Assassin’s Creed 4, Batman: Arkham Origins and Splinter Cell Blacklist.
Given the impressive hardware specifications and gaming benchmarks, we’re keen to review the GeForce GTX 780 Ti and see how it performs in our tests against the Radeon R9 290X. Keep checking www.expertreviews.co.uk for the forthcoming review.