GeForce GTX 760 and GTX 770 Benchmarked and Reviewed

Nvidia’s GTX 700 series now extends to the GTX 760, after the successive launches of the GTX Titan, the GTX 780 and the GTX 770. Us hardware reviewers in our carpenter pants and thick rimmed glasses have been working tirelessly through long nights and weekends, benchmarking Nvidia’s new generation of GPUs.

The GTX 760 is where Nvidia will stop, for the moment at least, sigh.

Don’t get us wrong, we love GPUs. We have a fetish for it. But the GTX 700 lineup is based on the previous lineup, so there’s no new silicon here. *yawn* Nvidia has simply taken the old GPU and tweaked it around here and there, to give a significant performance boost while maintaining similar levels of pricing to the previous generation.

The GeForce GTX 760
Priced at INR 19,499, the GeForce GTX 760 is aimed at the budget-conscious and value-seeking buyer. and directly replaces the GTX 660 Ti. The GTX 760 uses the same GK104 chipset used in the GTX 660 Ti, with some minor adjustments.

Ready for a spin, darling?The back side of the GTX 760 looks almost identical to that of the GTX 660 Ti minus the metallo-plastic casing. The casing on the reference GTX 760 is not of the standards of the GTX 770, 780 and Titan, which feature an aluminium-magnesium housing. The metallo-plastic casing in the GTX 760 feels inferior to the BOM used in the later GPUs.

In our review of the GTX 780, we spoke about shader multiprocessors (SMXes) and raster units. With the GTX 660 Ti, Nvidia switched off one SMX unit amongst eight present in the GK104 chip. Along with that, out of the four ROP units and memory controllers, one unit was completely shut off. In the GTX 760, it is the same GK104 chipset, but with all the ROP partitions and memory controllers enabled. However, to absorb the effect of one full ROP partition switched on, Nvidia disable one SMX unit. Doing the math, this leads us to the following numbers:

Source: Techreport

The GK104 chipset houses four graphics processing clusters (GPC). Each GPC has two SMX units and a raster engine. As seen with the GTX 780, the way the SMXes are disabled is totally random, and so is the same case with the GTX 760. Nvidia can either disable one entire GPC or turn off two SMXes across two separate GPCs (One GPC houses two SMXes). Both configurations lead to a variation in triangles rasterised per clock.

Thus, the GTX 760 offers inconsistent specs to a single product with a single trade name. This is not an ideal business practice, but the repercussions are minimal, and in some cases, even beneficial. This gives Nvidia more breathing room to refurbish defective GPUs.

Like the rest of the GTX 700 series, the GTX 760 features the GPU Boost 2.0 algorithm, which use GPU temperatures and not the power draw to determine clock speeds. This has allowed the base clock speeds in the GTX 760 to reach 980Mhz, compared to 915Mhz in the 660 Ti. Since the GPU Boost 2.0 algorithm has the ability to manipulate voltages to increase clock-speed, expect to see vendors offering a plethora of faster models with higher clock speeds. Gigabyte and MSI have already introduced GTX 760 cards with 1085Mhz base clock and 1150 Boost clock speeds.

                                                                        Source: Techreport

The GTX 760 is in direct competition with the Radeon HD 7950 price wise, but comparing theoretical numbers, the GTX 760 takes lead in almost every aspect. Also, enabling one extra ROP has had its effect on the minimum TDP. The GTX 760 stands at a 170W power draw, compared to the 150W of the GTX 660 Ti.

We’ve already spoken about the new fan controllers in the GTX 700 series, and the GTX 760 follows suit. The new fan control algorithm has lesser variations in revolutions per minute, thus the perceived noise is less. The GTX 780 has the same fan algorithm, and our results showed that the difference in noise levels was evident for the good. The GTX 760 doesn’t come with the same premium fan and heat-sink, so we’ll have to test the noise levels to see how it performs.