Today, NVIDIA released its first refresh to its 2 year old GTX 6xx series of PC GPUs, the GeForce GTX 780. The GeForce GTX 600 series was launched back in March 2012, so that makes it roughly over an year for the next refresh to appear. The GeForce GTX 780 still uses the good old 28nm Kepler chip, which is half way down it’s 2 year life cycle. NVIDIA’s business model strongly relies on yearly refreshes, so the next in line series was due, as expected.
And thus here we have the GeForce GTX 780, which is the spiritual successor to the GTX 680. Like the GTX 680, the GTX 780 is supposed to be the flag bearing card of the GTX 7xx series. To refresh your memory, NVIDIA also launched the Rs. 70,000 worth GTX Titan a few months ago. So while the GTX 780 might be NVIDIA’s flagship, the GTX Titan is still the ultimate performance king. That places the GeForce GTX 780 in a funny position. It might be the flagship of their latest series, yet it is still easily trumped by the GTX Titan.
GK110 all the way
The GeForce GTX 780, like the Titan, uses the Kepler based GK110 graphics chip. and this season’s upgrade is an incremental one. NVIDIA is getting a grip on the Kepler architecture as the days progress, which is evident why they’ve opted for 28nm manufacturing. We’ll be getting deeper into the architecture of the card once we receive our review unit. So far, we have the following specifications confirmed.
As seen here, the GeForce GTX 780 is roughly the same as the GTX Titan, only a slightly trimmed version. The GTX 780 does with 384 less Stream Processing units, and has a total of 2304 of them, compared to the Titan’s 2688. Even the texture units have been cut short about 20%, reducing from 224 units to 192 in the GTX 780.
A big generation jump
Performance jump promised by NVIDIA are rather optimistic numbers, but we’ll have to wait to take a test drive on the GTX 780 to see where it really stands in performance increases against the GeForce GTX 680.
Further reduction in noise
With the GTX Titan we saw a reduction in decibel levels at idle operation. Since the GTX 780 is almost similar, the idle noise level are further reduced. Below are the load noise levels as advertised by NVIDIA.
NVIDIA promises the card to be ready for upcoming PC titles such as Call of Duty: Ghosts, Watch Dogs and Battlefield 4.
Pricing – not to sweet
Watch out for variants of the GeForce GTX 780 to be out soon by a plethora of manufacturers i.e. Asus, Zotac, Palit, Gigabyte etc. Pricing of the GTX 780 is expected to start at INR 48,990. We suspect the price to be cheaper is bought from wholesale outlets. The cost of the card in the US is $649, that makes it roughly INR 36,000. Such a big difference (nearly 50%) of price in India is unreasonable. We have mentioned this fact to NVIDIA, and waiting for them to get back to us.
Stay tuned for more GTX 780 related information.
