NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 Review: The $400 Fight
by Ryan Smith on May 30, 2013 9:00 AM ESTTotal War: Shogun 2
Our next benchmark is Shogun 2, which is a continuing favorite to our benchmark suite. Total War: Shogun 2 is the latest installment of the long-running Total War series of turn based strategy games, and alongside Civilization V is notable for just how many units it can put on a screen at once. Even 2 years after its release it’s still a very punishing game at its highest settings due to the amount of shading and memory those units require.
With Shogun 2 we see an immediate advantage for NVIDIA and the GTX 770 in particular. Where the 7970GE and GTX 680 were generally tied here, the GTX 770 pulls ahead by several percent. It won’t get GTX 770 to 50fps at 2560, but it at least gets it into the 40s.
Altogether this gives the GTX 770 a 19% advantage over the 7970GE. Meanwhile against past generation NVIDIA cards the difference is anywhere between 14% over the GTX 680, and coming very close to outright doubling the performance of the GTX 570. The GTX 680 comparison ends up being particularly interesting, as this is well ahead of where clockspeed alone should have pushed the GTX 770. In this case Shogun 2 seems to especially benefit from that extra memory bandwidth.
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LoccOtHaN - Friday, May 31, 2013 - link
True Bro ;-) AMD is more user friendly, but when Next-Gen on ATI/AMD comes PS4 and M$ XBx1 then all optimalisation will be AMD friendly and DX11.1 (DX11.x or Full DX11) and we won !whyso - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
Well looks like the 7970 ghz has been tied. Lower price is nice but almost no OC headroom (wouldn't be surprised if AT got a cherry picked sample) and no game bundle. Similar power consumption too. Performance increase is virtually 0 but the price decrease is nice.A5 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
Worth pointing out that you can pretty easily get the AMD bundle codes for ~$30 on eBay. It wipes out the price advantage, but it does let you weigh the cards on the merits of their hardware.steve_rogers42 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
Think there is an error on page 7,"Of course this is only a 9% increase in the GPU clockspeed, which is going to pale in comparison to parts like GTX 670 and GTX 780, each of which can do 20%+ due to their lower clockspeeds. So there’s some overclocking headroom in GTX 780, but as to be expected not a ton."
Last sentence should read GTX 770 yea?
Great article, good to see nvidia's progress with the GPU boost 2 and taking on-board the tdp/power issue that the 600 series seems to have had. It will be interesting to see what they make of the 760 and what it will contain.
Cheers,
nathanddrews - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
Wow... at worst it is equal with the 680 for $100 less. At best, it is tied with the 780 for $250 less. I think NVIDIA needs to reexamine their pricing model - I'm sure the market will fix it for them. Either the 770 is too cheap or the 780 is way too expensive. (signs point to the latter)shompa - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
GTX 780 die is huge. It costs Nvidia almost double to manufacture a 780GTX then a 770/680 die.Only if Nvidia have enough harvested defect dies from Tesla chips they could/would lower the price on GTX 780.
EJS1980 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
If the 780 performs better than the 680 by 30-35% out the gate w/ crappy day1 drivers (future updates will only increase that advantage), how exactly is it tied with the 770?nathanddrews - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
How exactly is it tied? Like I said, at its best.http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/829?vs=827
770 and 780 tied (within +/-5%):
DiRT: Showdown - 1920x1080 - Ultra Quality + 4xMSAA
Sleeping Dogs - 1920x1080 - Ultra Quality + Normal AA
Battlefield 3 - 1920x1080 - Ultra Quality + FXAA-High
Compute: Civilization V
Compute: Sony Vegas Pro 12 Video Render
Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage Pixel Fill
EJS1980 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
Your link shows the 780 with a pretty substantial performance advantage, save for a couple instances. I stand by my comment.nathanddrews - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
It's easy to stand by your comment if you completely ignore what I wrote and ignore the facts. For instance, the 680 was not tested with "crappy day1 drivers", it was tested with very recent 320.14 drivers while the 770/780 used 320.18. In addition, I never said that the 770 was always tied with the 780, I said "at its best", which means that at the high end it ties the 780 in some benchmarks. At its worst, on the low end, the 770 is tied with the 680 in some benchmarks. I hope that clarifies things for you.