NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 Review: The $400 Fight

Final Thoughts

This current generation of video cards has been something of a rollercoaster ride in both performance and leadership. In the last 18 months we’ve seen AMD take the lead with Radeon HD 7970, unexpectedly lose it to GeForce GTX 680, gain it again with Radeon HD 7970 GE and greatly improved drivers, and then break even in the end with GTX 770. GTX 780 and GTX Titan make all of this moot with their much greater single-GPU performance, but priced as they are they’re also nowhere near being in the same market segment as the GTX 770 and 7970GE.

In any case, more than anything else it strikes us as particularly funny that we’re once again looking at a tie. That’s right: on average GTX 770 and 7970GE are tied. GTX 770 delivers 102% of the performance of 7970GE at both our high quality 2560x1440 and high quality 1920x1080 settings. Of course as with some of the past battles between AMD and NVIDIA in this segment, these cards may be tied in our benchmarks but they’re anything but equal.

After all is said and done, the GTX 770 ends up beating the 7970GE at 6 games, while the 7970GE takes the other 4. Meanwhile within those individual games we’ll see anything between a near-tie to a very significant 20% advantage for either side, depending on the game in question. This is very much a repeat of what we saw with the GTX 680 versus the 7970GE, and GTX 670 versus the 7970.

Our advice then for prospective buyers is to first look at benchmarks for the games they intend to play. If you’re going to be focused on only a couple of games for the near future then there’s a very good chance one card or the other is going to be the best fit. Otherwise for gamers facing a wide selection of games or looking at future games where their performance is unknown, then the GTX 770 and 7970GE are in fact tied, and from a performance perspective you couldn’t go wrong with either one.

With that said, there are a couple of wildcard factors in play here that can tilt things in either side’s favor. At $399 the GTX 770 is cheaper than the 7970GE by $20 to $50, depending on the model and whether there’s a sale going on (the 7970 is actually priced closer, but we’d consider the 7970GE the better value for AMD cards). Consumers at virtually every level are still very price-conscious, so that’s going to put AMD in a pinch as they need 7970GE, not 7970 vanilla, to match GTX 770.

At the same time however given the fact that we’re looking at a performance tie AMD is making a very serious effort to offer more value than NVIDIA through their Level Up with Never Settle Reloaded gaming bundle. These bundles are non-tangible items – the value of which is solely in the eye of the beholder – but for a buyer interested in those games it’s going to be a very convincing argument. And then there’s compute performance and the amount of included RAM, both of which continue to favor AMD, though admittedly this is nothing new.

Meanwhile on a side note, it’s interesting to note that as evidenced by this launch that AMD has pushed NVIDIA to the point where NVIDIA has generally sacrificed their efficiency advantage to reach performance parity at a $400 price point. At the launch of the 7970GE NVIDIA at least tied the 250W 7970GE with a 195W GTX 680, giving NVIDIA an efficiency advantage. But now with the launch of the GTX 770 NVIDIA needs a 230W card to match that very same 250W 7970GE, a testament to AMD’s driver improvements and a reflection of the fact that just like AMD, NVIDIA needed to push a GPU to its limits to get here. There are still some edge cases here worth considering – you can’t get 7970GE on a blower for example – but under gaming workloads AMD and NVIDIA’s power consumption and heat generation have been equalized, making these cards more tied than ever before.

Ultimately a tie is a wonderful thing and a frustrating thing at the same time, and that’s definitely the case here with the launch of the GTX 770. The wonderful aspect of it is that NVIDIA and AMD are once again locked in vicious, brutal combat around the $400 price point. It has brought performance up and prices down in the middle of a generation, improving the options for all customers. The frustrating aspect on the other hand is that having a clear winner makes customers feel better as it removes any question about whether they’ve made the right choice. After all it’s much easier to make a choice when there’s really no choice to be made.

Moving on to some other comparisons, though we’ve focused mostly on the immediate competition, for those buyers on an upgrade cycle things have panned out pretty much as to be expected. The GTX 770 delivers an average performance improvement of 75% over the two-and-a-half year old GTX 570, which is roughly what we’d expect for jumping from one mid-generation card to another, and at $399 it is reasonably priced as an upgrade. The performance improvement from the GTX 670 is much smaller at just 20%, but GTX 770 is clearly not targeted at GTX 670 owners as an upgrade. At the same time it’s interesting to note that between the higher core clockspeed, higher memory clockspeed, and higher TDP plus GPU Boost 2.0 found on GTX 770, NVIDIA has improved their performance over GTX 680 by just 7% on average. This isn’t a lot in and of itself, but we’re talking about replacing a $450 video card with a $400 video card that’s faster across the board, so it’s a nice way to raise the bar on performance while bringing prices down.

Wrapping things up, this should set the stage for the enthusiast/high-end market for the rest of the year. According to AMD’s last schedule they won’t have a new high-end part to replace Tahiti until the end of the year, and NVIDIA won’t have Maxwell until 2014; all of this being complicated by the fact that TSMC’s 20nm process is still so far out. NVIDIA still has the rest of the GeForce 700 lineup to roll out through the next few months, but for the GTX 770 and the 7970/7970GE, the rest of the year will be a battle of prices and bundles.