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GeForce GTX 760 launches, pushes prices down at the $250 mark
How excited can you get about the sixth desktop bin of a GK104 die? Well, that all depends on whether you're looking to buy a new video card for around $250. Recall that Nvidia's GK104 chip has 8 SMXes and 4 memory channels, which left the video memory struggling to feed the GPU chip adequately. So far, we've seen:
GeForce GTX 680: 8 SMXes, 4 memory channels active
GeForce GTX 670: 7 SMXes, 4 memory channels active
GeForce GTX 660 Ti: 7 SMXes, 3 memory channels active
GeForce GTX 660 (OEM-only version): 6 SMXes, 3 memory channels active
GeForce GTX 770: 8 SMXes, 4 memory channels active, clocked higher than GTX 680
GeForce GTX 760: 6 SMXes, 4 memory channels active
Whether a GTX 760 or GTX 660 Ti is faster depends on whether you're constrained more by memory bandwidth/ROPs or shader/TMU performance. That the GTX 760 is faster in nearly all games pretty much confirms what we've long known: a lot of Kepler cards were short on memory bandwidth.
The new GTX 760 beats the older GTX 660 Ti in just about all games, and often by a lot. The GTX 660 Ti was never a good value for the money, but a faster GTX 760 that is now cheaper than it should hopefully end the constant Nvidia fanboy recommendations of the GTX 660 Ti. For obvious reasons, the new GTX 760 is slower than the older GTX 670.
But the big deal is not just that the GTX 760 has launched, but that it costs $250. For a long time now, if you went above a Radeon HD 7870 or GeForce GTX 660 at around $200, performance per dollar went way down. Now we can extend that limit upward to a $250 GeForce GTX 760.
AMD has long owned the $250-$300 market, with the Radeon HD 7870 XT (Sapphire's version) or MYST (PowerColor's version) at $250 and the Radeon HD 7950 Boost at $300. That ends today, with the GTX 760 clearly better than the former and arguably better than the latter, while clearly being cheaper than a 7950.
We'll see if AMD responds with price cuts as they did when the GTX 770 launched, but their ability to do so may be somewhat limited, as Tahiti cards (Radeon HD 7900 series) are more expensive to build than corresponding bins of GK104 cards. Unlike the previous three generations when AMD had a huge cost of production over Nvidia, GK104 has the cost advantage over Tahiti.
Comments
What good news!
I was actually looking to buy a new card for around 250 max lol I should probably wait a few days before I rush out and buy one though and see what AMD does.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/skyrim-anime-overhaul
That figures! I am building a new PC and bought 2 660Ti cards.
Had I waited 1 month, they would have been cheaper! (I paid $297 each.)
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Nope. But my uncle's graphics card died the other day, and he needs a card for his 3d rendering (and whatever else he does, I think he or maybe its my cousin, gets paid by Youtube or something for game videos, and one tends to need good performance for that kind of thing). So, I think his plan was to get the 660 Ti out of my cousin's computer and get him the gtx 760. Or the other way around. In any case, one of them needs a new graphics card.
I think my cousin was just curious if he did go with the gtx 760, if it would be any noticable for his gaming. Especially that of a modded Skyrim and he plays battlefield quite a bit, and some other graphics intensive games. Not sure what he all plays, but he always tries to up the graphics and mod them to be better, if possible.
I don't know what my cousin's system specs are, since he hasn't give them to me. But he gets 30-40 fps (with occasional dips below 30) in his modded Skyrim, and I know his PC is slightly better than mine.
(edit: And if it matters that much. It would be a bigger upgrade for my Uncle, since he had a geforce 500 something. So, I think its more like, if its noticable enough an upgrade for my cousin's 660 Ti (especially if it helps him not slightly dip below 30 in Skyrim, and better performance in his other modded games), and if so, he'd get it. otherwise my uncle would stick the 760 into his PC.
I think that is mostly why they wanted to know. But like I said, one of them is getting an upgrade anyway.)
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/skyrim-anime-overhaul
titan is not a card made for games
That basically constitutes going out of your way to find the worst value for the money that you can. That's why you come here to ask for advice on what to get before you buy, rather than just buying something random and hoping it's good. Or rather, you don't, but it's why you should.
For only a little more money, a single GeForce GTX 780 would have been a vastly superior option.
If you're still in the process of building the computer but haven't finished it, is it too late to return the GTX 660 Tis and buy something more sensible? Even if you have to pay a restocking fee, I'd rather have a single GTX 770 ($400) and not have to fuss with SLI being troublesome.
Any advice for my cousin and uncle? They are nvidia fans, so I think they probably just stick with Nvidia.
Would the 760 have any noticable fps boost for my cousin (like I said, he gets 30-40 fps in his modded skyrim with occasional dips below 30 on his 660 Ti)? Or should it just go to my uncle's computer? One of them is getting an upgrade anyway, since my Uncle's card died on him (he had a geforce 500 something).
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/skyrim-anime-overhaul
What both Nvidia and AMD do is to have several different GPU chips each generation, and have all but the top one focused primarily on consumer use, especially gaming. The top chip has some additional stuff added to improve GPU compute capabilities, but the extra stuff is useless for gaming. The top chip then pulls double duty, as it functions both as a high end chip for consumer video cards, and also as the chip that powers GPU compute cards. It has all of the stuff needed for gaming, and more of it than the lower end chips, so they're still nice gaming cards. But the extra GPU compute stuff increases die size, power consumption and cost, which is why AMD and Nvidia don't include it in lower end chips.
The GTX 760 would probably be a little better for gaming, but not a lot. It's likely not worth the hassle of swapping the cards out and reinstalling drivers, especially since it would also leave your uncle with a slightly inferior card. I'd probably just leave your cousin with a slightly slower card today and then plan on upgrading his card first when the time comes.
The exception is if your cousin is using high resolution texture packs that push video memory usage above 1.5 GB, and then the mismatched memory channels on the GTX 660 Ti are causing trouble. One way to test that out is to have him reduce the texture resolution if the game has an option for it and see if his frame rate changes. If a game uses very high resolution textures, it's pretty much guaranteed that there will be an option for lower resolution textures just because it's pretty trivial to mipmap the textures down. And if you're not using very high resolution textures, video memory shouldn't be a problem unless the game does something very strange (and probably very stupid).
He said his performance goes WAY up if he sets the textures to the lowest . To about 50 or so. But he uses 2k/4k texture pack mods for Skyrim (which results him getting an occasional dip to 26-28 fps, with average between 30-40 fps, according to his FRAPs, on the highest settings). Without any mods, he gets 100+ fps.
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/skyrim-anime-overhaul
Make sure that he's only changing the texture resolution, and not changing a bunch of things at once. If he's changing a bunch of things at once, then you can't tell what's responsible for the change in frame rate. If there are more than two texture resolution options, then have him try all of them; if the max resolution is causing a big frame rate hit, then most likely all other resolution options would give essentially identical frame rates.
Video memory capacity is a lot like system memory capacity: either you have enough or you don't, and there isn't that much of a gray area between them. If you have enough, then there's no real benefit to adding more. But if you don't have enough, then you take a big performance hit. The needed amount of video memory capacity is mostly driven by the amount of video memory needed to store your textures, and that depends very strongly on the texture resolution that you're using.
In raw frame rates, a single GTX 760 isn't that big of an upgrade from two GTX 460s in SLI. If the part of the goal is to get rid of the finickyness of SLI, then it's a more worthy upgrade. But in that case, I'd think that you wouldn't want to go back to SLI in the future.
If you're going to buy the second GTX 760 very soon, then I'd have advised looking at a single GTX 770 or GTX 780 instead. While I'd advise against two GTX 760s in SLI, I could kind of understand going that route.
And if you're not going to buy a second GTX 760 very soon, then buying it eventually is probably going to be a bad idea. If a year from now, you decide that you want more performance than a single GTX 760 offers, then the sensible thing to do will probably be to get rid of the GTX 760 that you just bought and buy a new card that isn't available today. The die shrink to 20 nm should happen around the end of the year (at least for AMD; Nvidia is traditionally slower about moving to new process nodes), and TSMC is promising a 16 nm FinFET process node about a year later.
Furthermore, it's not clear how long-lived of a card the GTX 760 will be. If Nvidia waited over a year after introducing video cards based on the GK104 die before they felt the need to introduce a retail card that disables two of the SMXes, then they probably don't have that many GK104 dies that can't fit a higher bin, such as the GTX 670 or GTX 770. It's entirely possible that the GTX 760 will mostly disappear from retail around the time that the Nvidia launches the first GeForce 800 series cards. Assuming that they call their next series the GeForce 800 series, that is; with Nvidia, you never know. (Exhibit A on this: Titan)
I don't expect to see huge performance gains or anything with this upgrade, small would be fine. I hate SLI setups, Id rather have 1 card for a number of reasons and my 460's are coming up on 4 years old so it was time to move up a bit without breaking the bank. Ive been pretty impressed with the two 460's, they've handled games very well but I knew going to a 650 or 660 was a waste of time that's why I wanted to get a 680 as my next upgrade only it was $500. That's why the 760 fits pretty well I think, I get a small upgrade, knockout my SLI setup and instead of getting 1 card for $500 I can also get a new monitor
I will add that performance discussions I've read have shown the GTX 760 stock would be about 15-20% performance gain over the (2) 460's. More with the overclocked card(which I got). So a ballpark 20-30% performance gain for $250 is IMO value.
760 is hardly any better then the 660 Ti and still below 580 andd 690 cards.
not to mention Gtx 670 and 680 perform better then all those cards.
It's odd that your GTX 460s are so old when you consider that three years ago, the cards hadn't even launched.
Getting an extra monitor is definitely a worthy upgrade if you only have one. And maybe even if you already have two. Unless you don't have space on your desk for it, in which case, a new desk is also a worthy upgrade.
What's so bad about it hardly being any better than a GeForce GTX 660 Ti? It's both better and cheaper. Isn't that a good thing? And a GeForce GTX 760 is definitely better than a GTX 580 in pretty much everything except for some GPU compute purposes, but I don't see what that has to do with anything.
A 760 overclocked(which was what I bought) is quite a bit better then a 660Ti and the overclock brings it pretty close to a 770.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7103/nvidia-geforce-gtx-760-review/17
Also, I don't think you can even buy a GTX 580 anymore(discontinued on Newegg) and a GTX 690 is like what...$1000+? The GTX 760 is a very good price for a high quality card especially for anyone who's using a 400 series card or older.
Sorry, I was wrong. My cousin has a 660 superclocked, but it isn't the Ti version. Not sure if that makes a difference. My other cousin is the one with the Ti, but he isn't upgrading any time soon.
How is the GTX 760 superclocked compared to the 660 superclocked that my cousin has? Or would it still be better for my Uncle to keep the upgrade?
Not sure the difference between all these version names. But I'm guessing Ti is better than not Ti.
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/skyrim-anime-overhaul
A GeForce GTX 660 non-TI is a little slower than the GTX 660 Ti but a lot cheaper, so it's far more likely that your cousin got a good value for the money when he bought it. You could realistically expect a GTX 670 to be maybe 20%-30% faster than a GTX 660. Whether that's enough to make it worth swapping cards out is a matter of opinion.
As for the names confusing you, that's intentional on Nvidia's part. Ignore the marketing names and look at the specs. The GTX 660 isn't listed in my original post as it's a different chip, but it's got 5 SMXes and 3 memory channels.
Playing: Smite, Marvel Heroes
Played: Nexus:Kingdom of the Winds, Everquest, DAoC, Everquest 2, WoW, Matrix Online, Vangaurd, SWG, DDO, EVE, Fallen Earth, LoTRo, CoX, Champions Online, WAR, Darkfall, Mortal Online, Guild Wars, Rift, Tera, Aion, AoC, Gods and Heroes, DCUO, FF14, TSW, SWTOR, GW2, Wildstar, ESO, ArcheAge
Waiting On: Nothing. Mmorpg's are dead.