GeForce GTX 760 and GTX 770 Benchmarked and Reviewed

The GeForce GTX 770
The GeForce GTX 770 has been introduced by Nvidia at a price starting INR 29,990, one notch below the GeForce GTX 680, which make the GTX 680 entirely redundant in the market. (She will be missed) We take a closer look at the architecture and its performance.
The GTX 770 is primarily a GTX 680, only with a couple of adjustments under the hood. The GTX 770 is the only GPU in the GeForce 700 series to feature a fully functional GPU. We’re saying this because the GTX 780, which is based on the GK110 chipset has three SMX units disabled. Even the GTX Titan does not run on a fully enabled chipset, with one SMX unit disabled on the GK110.

The GTX 770 uses the GK104 chipset, the same chipset used in the GTX 660Ti, the GTX 680 and the GTX 760, but with all four GPCs enabled; thus, a fully functional GPU. And this is also the reason why only the GTX 770 is manufactured without any variations like in the GTX 760, 780 and the Titan.

Where the difference lies is the clock speeds, duh! The base and Boost clock speeds in the GeForce GTX 770 are 1046Mhz and 1085Mhz, respectively. The GTX 680 sported 1006/1058 Mhz, so the increase seen in the GTX 770 is at most, modest. Such a modest increase has led to the increase of the card’s TDP to 230W. That is up 35W compared to the GTX 680. The GTX 770 employs the GPU Boost 2.0 algorithm, like it’s brothers from the same line-up.

The GeForce GTX 770 has also seen an upgrade in the memory transfer rate, standing at 7 GT/s, up 1 GT/s from the GTX 680.

One thing to take note of is the build on our reference GTX 770 graphics card. Anyone can mistake this as a GTX 780 or a GTX Titan, since this is built with the same aluminium magnesium casing shared with the latter. The fan is rock-solid and heavy, and works like charm. In our GTX 780 tests, we saw that the same fan is super quite and efficient in controlling the temperature. We doubt that vendors will offer the same build on their versions of the GTX 770 reference.

On the Software side
Along with the launch of the GTX 700 series , Nvidia has introduced GeForce Experience, a software utility made with a fundamental objective to provide users with proper optimization of video game’s visual settings as per the installed GPU and other system components.  GeForce Experience witnessed 2.5 million downloads during its Beta Testing cycle. It is out of Beta now, and has been officially released. The software is compatible with all Nvidia GPUs. Another objective this software has is to keep your system updated with the latest Nvidia GPU drivers to serve upto the mark performances.

How GeForce Experience optimizes games is simple. It scans your system for installed games and reads the in-game graphics settings, and adjusts them accordingly. The adjustments, as Nvidia claims, are done by analysing the capabilities of other installed computer components, and using Nvidia’s database of user submitted results with the same GPUs. They are pretty accurate, but if you can handle the in-game graphics settings menu yourself, you should go ahead, as you still have more control over the situation. An example of how GFE works is given in the image above.
GPU Boost 2.0
GPU boost 2.0 is the updated and improved version of the previous GPU Boost 1.0. It allows you to change the power target as well as the temperature target of the GPU. This is an incredible feature we saw on the GTX Titan as well as the GTX 780, and we predict to see this on other cards in the GTX 700 lineup as well . Also to mention that the GPU boost 1.0 operates within the voltage limitations, while on the other hand the GPU Boost 2.0 does not.

Testing Methodology

Gone are the days where the average frames per second over a two minute run in-game are used as the sole quantifier of how good a GPU is. We noticed in the past that average FPS does not count for smooth gameplay. Some GPUs have high FPS number but real-time gaming is a stutter-full experience. And thus, what we do is that we calculate the time the GPU takes to render each frame. GPUs that render frames faster play the game smoother.

Test Bed
CPU: Intel Core i5 3570k @ 4.5 Ghz
Motherboard: Asrock z77 Pro4
RAM: 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 SD RAM at 1600Mhz
PSU: Seasonic X850W
Chipset Drivers: INF update 9.2.3.1023
OS: Windows 8 x64
Nvidia WHQL Drivers: 320.18
We use Fraps as our sole FPS calculator. The version of our Fraps is 3.5.99.