At 1080p your expensive new card will just be bored twiddling its silicon thumbs while it idly throws polygons around your relatively low-res screen. You really need to be pushing that much graphical data through your GPU to justify the purchase.
The GTX 780 is also a card only for those lucky or well-off enough to be gaming on a panel, or set of panels, with a native resolution higher than 2560x1440. With the GTX 780, Nvidia have almost created a new class of card sitting between enthusiast and ultra-enthusiast. That kind of puts the GTX 780 in a bit of a no-man's land between the affordable hobbyist cards of this technology generation and the likes of the aspirational, ultra-enthusiast class of cards like the GTX Titan, HD 7990 and GTX 690. The next card down the stack, the GTX 680, is around £200/$200 less but suffers the same performance hit compared with the GTX 780 as AMD's HD 7970 GHz Edition. You're looking at a card that is almost as good in games for a good chunk less cash. If you're considering a Titan, the price tag will seem less alarming. At £550/$650 it is a huge amount of money, though that might be because there's so much silicon in there – seven billion transistors versus three and a half billion in the GTX 680's GK 104 GPU. That still puts it some 20% slower than AMD's top card, the still somewhat irrelevant dual-GPU HD 7990, but compared with their best single-GPU card you're still looking anywhere up to 70% faster performance from the GTX 780 versus the HD 7970 GHz Edition.ĭoes that justify the price? It's impossible to ignore the fact that this is the single most expensive graphics card launching a new generation I can remember. At those speeds the GTX 780 can easily outpace a stock-clocked Titan across the board. Thanks to the impressive and robust cooling solution Nvidia have tucked in behind those chromium plates, I was able to push the clock speed up to 1,189MHz. Usefully, like the Titan, the GTX 780 sports Nvidia's shiny new GPU Boost 2.0 tech you can overclock the living hell out of the poor GK 110 GPU. In this case "just shy" means about 10% slower than the card that's still retailing for around £250/$350 more. In performance terms, the GTX 780 is just shy of GTX Titan levels of gaming prowess. To that end, Nvidia have disabled the double precision performance of the GPU inside the GTX 780, though that really wont make any difference when playing games.
#Gtx 780 fp64 professional
Nvidia are targeting high-end gamers with the GTX 780, not than the pro-graphics folk who saw the GTX Titan as a cheap way to get hold of a Tesla K20X professional card. The GTX 780 also comes with a slightly higher base clock than the standard GTX Titan - 863MHz plays 837MHz there. Another is the fact that while they've cut the amount of video memory in half, down to 3GB from 6GB, it's still running with that huge 384-bit memory bus.