14 DAY TRIAL // AMD really shocked the world when it released the Radeon R9 290X graphics card, and again with the R9 290, so now NVIDIA wants to return the favor, so it has released the GeForce GTX 780 Ti.
We've known this was coming for weeks. It was impossible to miss it really, given how much awe AMD inspired, awe that, naturally, NVIDIA won't suffer for long.
The GeForce GTX 780 Ti is the epitome of the Kepler architecture, even more so than the GTX Titan, despite using the same GPU.
Here, the GK110, with its 2,880 CUDA cores, 384-bit memory interface, 240 TMUs (texture mapping units), and 48 ROPs (raster operating units) runs at 876 MHz, or 928 MHz under GPU Boost.
3 GB of GDDR5 VRAM are available, clocked at 7 GHz, and there might be 6 GB models soon too, but that's neither here nor there. Also, dual-DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs are available, plus the familiar single-fan cooler.
What's important now is the performance chart that NVIDIA posted, where it implies that the GTX 780 Ti is far superior to the AMD Radeon R9 290X.
Given the price of $699 / €699, it was pretty much necessary to make this claim. We have no doubt that there are games where NVIDIA dominates, but that's because some titles are optimized for NVIDIA, just like some are better run on AMD cards.
Speaking of which, NVIDIA has introduced a game bundle too, but we'll see to that separately in a jiffy. For now, this questionable chart is more important.
To be fair, the benchmarks leaked prior to this day did say that GTX 780 Ti was better than anything else out there. The difference between it and the R9 290X wasn't so sharp though. In fact, it seemed to be more than offset by the AMD card's lower price ($550 / €550). Obviously, a gap of $150 / €150 is nothing to scoff at.
Still, NVIDIA might have managed to create a good enough driver to improve the performance of its new wonder child, so those previous benchmarks may very well have been misleading.
On the flip side, the architecture is, in the end, the same, so there can't be too massive an improvement in software optimization compared to GeForce driver operation on GTX Titan. This really is mostly a hardware face-off, so the AMD-NVIDIA contest is pretty tight. Then again, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
