Nvidia GeForce GTX 760 Review Roundup 75
An anonymous reader writes "Earlier today, Nvidia released its latest graphics card: the Geforce GTX 760. A followup to last month's GTX 770 launch, the new GTX 760 is the fourth 700-series card since the company launched the GTX Titan back in February. Sporting 1,152 CUDA cores, 96 TMUs, 32 ROPS, a 256-bit memory interface that effectively runs at 6 GHz, a base clock of 980 MHz, and a Boost speed of up to 1,033 MHz, the newly-minted GTX 760 is offered at a price point of $250. Benchmark results are available from all the usual suspects: AnandTech, HotHardware, PC Magazine, PCPer, and Tom's Hardware. To make a long story short, Nvidia's new card edges out AMD's equally-priced Radeon HD 7950 Boost Edition, and even goes toe-to-toe with the $300 Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition. Factoring out AMD's incredible Never Settle game bundles, and looking purely at performance, the GTX 670 allows Nvidia to cinch up the mainstream gaming price point."
Reader crookedvulture adds,
"The $250 card is an updated spin on an existing GPU, so it doesn't raise the bar dramatically. In fact, the GTX 760 achieves rough performance parity with the Radeon HD 7950 Boost, which costs just a little bit more. The situation is similar at around $400, where the contest between the GeForce GTX 770 and Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition is a toss-up overall. These price/performance scatter plots paint the picture clearly. AMD has largely resolved its previous frame latency issues with new drivers, making the battle between GeForce and Radeon more about extras than performance. Nvidia offers software to optimize game settings and record gameplay sessions, while AMD includes download codes for recent games. You really can't go wrong either way."
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The world as we know it might not even exist without Alan Turing. His contributions went well beyond computer science.
tl;dr: (Score:5, Informative)
It's the GeForce GTX 670 for a hundred bucks cheaper. That's what all the reviews boil down to.
Re:tl;dr: (Score:5, Informative)
I can't even look at AMD cards. Thanks to their drivers it's Nvidia only for me and my linux tower. Since Nvidia came out with their linux drivers years ago it's been one Nvidia card after another in every machine. AMD doesn't care of course since Linux is such a tiny slice of the customer pie which means when I build a windows box for friends I slap an Nvidia card in there too out of sheer resentment.
Re:tl;dr: (Score:4, Insightful)
Now that AMD powers all three consoles, it's likely that windows and BSD drivers will improve. Recompiling a BSD ps4 game for the Linux stream console probably will be less difficult than it has been in the past.
I'll still be buying NVidia this round as well.
Re:tl;dr: (Score:5, Insightful)
AMD powered two of the three consoles this past generation (Wii and 360), the drivers are still terrible (getting Enduro drivers working on Windows is a nightmare). Why would adding one more console change anything?
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The Wii and the 360 weren't x86.
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This is a bit like finding out that goodyear tires don't work well on cars, that they only really work on motorcycles and trucks. Astonishing, but I'd believe it since I don't know anything about them.
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I got a new business laptop recently. My last experience with discrete graphics in a laptop predates switchable graphics, so I presumed that by now, everything would "just work". Boy does it ever not. Something as simple as installing a driver update can precipitate hours of re-installing the various drivers (both Intel and AMD graphics drivers) in different order hoping to get them both working again. Turns out the solution is to wipe out every trace of graphic driver and then install everything in a very
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Hmm. I have a HP Envy 17 with an AMD/ATI 7670 (or something to that effect) in it...and it does have an option to use the built in (Intel) GPU, or use the discrete (ATI) GPU, or have them automatically switch when you're on battery power. Granted, you do need to install both ATI packages from HP to get the full monty (the later package is just an update, not a full set), but still...
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That option seems to basically be at the discretion of the system vendor. Perhaps it is available in newer drivers than I managed to get installed (it's a Dell notebook). I do know, though, that even when you tell it to default to discrete, it still runs some stuff on the iGPU. Enduro ultimately runs everything through the iGPU (framebuffer copies), so you need the Intel driver, and at the bare minimum the Intel drivers and control panel need to be run on the iGPU. It's unfortunately not possible to just ru
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They work perfectly fine overall. Most people who complain can often be put into one of these three specific categories:
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There is one more, specific use cases that amd does not handle well that nvidia does
Built a nice system about 2 years ago based on a 6850. Great price/performance and was pretty happy with it. However their multi-monitor performance leaves a lot to be desired. First you have to use a janky adapter in order to properly use 3 outputs due to the way their DACs are structured on the cards, even though you have 4 total outputs on the card you have to use a DP->HDMI/DVI adapter to run 3 separate monitors. T
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Either that or someone jailbreaks the PS4, dumps all it's system files and starts reversing.
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And that's assuming the PS4 games, and not just the apps, will actually be running on the BSD system.
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Nvidia is one of the few brands I have loyalty to. I think most of this loyalty comes from the ti4200 I bought back in the day, which was complete awesome, for many years.
I went to the 8800GT, then the 460gtx. Neither of these have impressed me as much, but they've been very good.
My next upgrade is a complete system - I'm still running a (quick) core 2 duo on an old motherboard, with that 460gtx. It was already about the quickest gfx card you could slot in the PCI express on the motherboard a few years a
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What's the last AMD you bought? I've traditionally been an nVidia user but haven't had major driver issues with AMD for a long time.
I do admit I almost never buy the latest-and-greatest cards (too damn expensive from either vendor compared to performance), but there's still within a relevant timespan (a year of first release).
For latest-and-greatest, I've had issues with both nVidia and AMD cards.
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It has same performance as the GTX 670, at the same TDP as a GTX 670, with the same board/shape/etc as the GTX 670, at a price that is $100 cheaper. It doesn't matter what it's based on.
Bloat (Score:4, Insightful)
Nvidia offers software to optimize game settings and record gameplay sessions
Did anyone else read that and think, "this does not belong in a device driver"?
Maybe it's a great idea that many people will use and there is no other possible way to accomplish this task in userspace. I'm open to that idea, but right now I just don't see the merit.
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Perhaps it's a rebranded copy of FRAPS, out whatever third part equivalent? If it is driver level, it'll be nice to see a standard way to output video for services like ustream or corporate users like webex out gotomeeting instead of some goofy Java setup through the browser.
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I don't see anywhere in the summary (who reads the articles anyway? ;) ) that implies it would be driver level. So I'd just assume they aren't that crazy.
I use MSI's Afterburner to record video from games and it works well enough for me (price seems right too): http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/download.htm [msi.com]
The output file ends up quite big and I need to use virtualdub or vlc to compress it. But that's because my PC isn't powerful enough to do on-the-fly H264 video compression of the capture at 60fps.
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Alternately, for those that do use it, it seems like a really good way to cut OUT a lot of bloat. By taking out the middle man, I would think that you would be able to get better quality for cheaper than if you used a 3rd party program like fraps. I could be wrong, but considering these cards tend to be targeted towards gamers, and gamers like to make videos of them playing games, it seems like there may be something to this.
Perhaps this is where I'm unusual. I play games sometimes, but I've never desired to make a video of my gameplay.
If I ever did that, well since it hasn't happened yet, it would be such a rare event that maximum performance and minimal overhead wouldn't be a big concern at all. I'd rather have a smaller, leaner, less bloated (and potentially less buggy) driver myself. I mean, I have an nVidia card and I do appreciate the ability to tweak the features and performance that their drivers offer, but that's
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Making a video of your gameplay can be very useful for beta testing. Fraps is a little crap at doing things like that sometimes.
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I fail to see it as detrimental. Nvidia deals with it by pouring tons of money and engineers and competent overseeing on their drivers, it's one of their biggest asset. Among the "useless" stuff they have done is support for stereo ten years before there were 3DTVs, stable driver for linux, BSD, even Solaris (well they have portability covered), ten years of driver support or more for a given GPU (even on linux), or recently support for game profiles on linux so you can at last have different AA, filtering,
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p.s. I doubt it's a driver level thing. It's likely to be one of those utilities that are bundled with the card.
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The best way to make it easy to capture video from a game is for the developers to add demo record/playback capabilities in their titles. Many games already support this. In windows, they can be run (with a command to load the demo) through something like kkapture which wraps the timing, gfx, and sound apis and captures the output to a codec of your choice (I use lagarith). From there, edit the file as you please. The framerate can be set, and as the game thinks it's always time to render the next frame
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Nvidia offers software to optimize game settings and record gameplay sessions
Did anyone else read that and think, "this does not belong in a device driver"?
Nope. Why would I, when nothing was said or implied that this functionality was being put in the device driver? My last AMD card said it came with some game software on the box, and I did not, upon reading that, think "games do not belong in a device driver" either. I'm quite comfortable with the notion that both nVidia and AMD can bundle software other than device drivers with their cards, and do not assume "software" necessarily means "device driver".
Re:Bloat (Score:5, Interesting)
Prior to that, the only way of recording the screen efficiently was to use HDMI recorders which would just take the entire output and transcode that externally, which is far less practical and much more expensive.
Needed for streaming to Shield console anyway (Score:3)
Such a feature was needed anyway and already exists. It's also the stuff behind the "Geforce GRID" (racked servers with GPUs that stream 3D accelerated software, like CAD, GIS, visualization or games to multiple thin clients, compatible with desktop virtualization, with choice between a "geforce" or "quadro" software configuration for each user)
Kepler GPUs include a H264 encoder used for that streaming purpose. Dumping to disk is a simple and interesting option, which I hadn't thought about but is obviousl
Not on Linux (Score:1)
Unless ATI is seriously reconsidering its position on Linux drivers, I would go blindly for an NVIDIA
My Geforce 220 is 10 times faster than a HD5970 (used to mine bitcoins on it) with all of the games (LoL, D3, TF2 etc.)
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And I've had the reverse experience. I've had an Nvidia (XFX?) board, not even an expensive one, blow its capacitors...something of a first for me with regards to video cards. Drivers have been...well, drivers...nothing to phone home about, they work...but the hardware has kind of left me wanting more.
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I had a 7600 pop its cap's but it was old then
but yea, I switched from a nvidia to an amd painlessly, it offered more bang for the buck and drivers havent been an issue, it just runs like it should
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And I've had the reverse experience. I've had an Nvidia (XFX?) board, not even an expensive one, blow its capacitors...something of a first for me with regards to video cards. Drivers have been...well, drivers...nothing to phone home about, they work...but the hardware has kind of left me wanting more.
Xfx are cheap crap.
If you want to have fewer problems buy the most expensive manufacturer of a given gpu, not the cheapest. I generally try and stick with gigabyte or evga.
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If you want to have fewer problems buy the most expensive manufacturer of a given gpu, not the cheapest. I generally try and stick with gigabyte or evga.
EVGA is crap, I had one only a few months old blow out a cap every week or two until the third time it stopped working. Sounded like gun fire every time. That was five years ago. The same Seasonic 80+ supply is going strong today powering a PNY Nvidia card.
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If you want to have fewer problems buy the most expensive manufacturer of a given gpu, not the cheapest. I generally try and stick with gigabyte or evga.
EVGA is crap, I had one only a few months old blow out a cap every week or two until the third time it stopped working. Sounded like gun fire every time. That was five years ago. The same Seasonic 80+ supply is going strong today powering a PNY Nvidia card.
Once it blew the first one you should have sent it back.
The only thing I have noticed though is that their stuff seems a little fussy about wanting a decent PSU.
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I didn't realize it was the video card blowing caps. I just heard what sounded like a gunshot every couple of weeks while wondering what was going on. I didn't take the time to package their junk up and mail to them to get another piece of junk. I'll just never buy EVGA again. FYI Seasonic is about as good of a brand of power supply as you can get. They were one of the very first companies to get an 80+ certification, mostly because they were about the only company already making ATX power supplies that wer
Gotta love Nvidia fans (Score:3)
Gotta love Apple fans (Score:3)
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Boo Nvidia (Score:1)
Just installed a 7850; it rules, and for 180 bucks I got it and 3 games. The fan casing was a quarter inch too long for my case before I took tin snips to it.
I'll keep buying AMD if only to promote competition in my favorite market.
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Also unlike Nvidia they don't set themselves on fire, and the drivers don't break multi-monitor suport. After my experiences I don't know if I'll by an Nvidia card ever again.