Today's Hard|Forum Post
Today's Hard|Forum Post
Date:
Monday , November 11, 2013
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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GeForce GTX 780 Ti vs. Radeon R9 290X 4K Gaming

It's time to take the GeForce GTX 780 Ti and Radeon R9 290X and see what kind of gameplay experience we can get on an Ultra HD 4K display. We saw AMD very much outpace NVIDIA at these 4K Ultra HD resolutions previously. We will find out which one dominates the super-high-resolution gaming scene.

Introduction

Continuing our evaluation of the new GeForce GTX 780 Ti and Radeon R9 290X we are going to focus on UltraHD "4K" gaming today. Let's take a step back and summarize what's on the test bench today.

The GeForce GTX 780 Ti was launched on November 7th, 2013. The GeForce GTX 780 Ti has an MSRP of $699. The GeForce GTX 780 Ti is based on the Kepler architecture GK110 GPU. It contains all SMX units the GK110 is capable of, giving us 2,880 CUDA Cores beating out the GeForce GTX 780 and even the GeForce GTX TITAN. In addition, it has 7GHz RAM bringing the memory bandwdith up to 336GB/sec. At 336GB/sec it now outperforms the Radeon R9 290X's 320GB/sec of bandwidth. This bandwidth will be very important when it comes to 4K display gaming.

In our testing, we have found that the GeForce GTX 780 Ti outperforms the GeForce GTX 780 and GeForce GTX TITAN at 1600p resolution. In our performance testing we found that it matches the gameplay experience of Radeon R9 290X, and technically outperforms it on raw framerate, while delivering the same experience.

The new Radeon R9 290X is priced $150 lower at $549. On paper, the Radeon R9 290X is impressive, even compared to the new GeForce GTX 780 Ti. In reality it turns out that it outperforms the GeForce GTX 780 and the GeForce GTX TITAN. It takes the new GeForce GTX 780 Ti to match the gameplay experience at 2560x1600 and lower. The key difference is that the Radeon R9 290X does it for $150 less.

Ultra HD 4K Gaming

When we originally tested the Radeon R9 290X we tested for the first time Ultra HD 4K display performance. We found something amazing in that evaluation. The Radeon R9 290X stomped the competition, i.e. GTX 780 and GTX TITAN at Ultra HD.

Today, we are going to revisit that testing and find out how the new GeForce GTX 780 Ti does against the Radeon R9 290X. Given the extra CUDA Cores, and now higher memory bandwidth, we look forward to the GTX 780 Ti doing a lot better at 4K than the GTX 780 and TITAN did.

Article Image

Just like we used in that evaluation, we will be using a Sharp PN-K321 Ultra HD display. This operates at a resolution of 3840x2160. That is a total pixel count of 8.2 million pixels. This is greater than our standard 3x1 24" display setup at 5760x1200 which equals 6.9 million pixels. This is the ultimate test of graphics performance on a single-display.

We will be testing the GTX 780 Ti with the latest beta driver, and the R9 290X with the latest Cat 13.11 Beta 9.2 driver. We will be running the R9 290X in uber mode. We will be testing highest-playable and apples-to-apples.

As for setting up the 4K display, it seems that setting it up is a bit better now on the GTX 780 Ti. When we launched each game, we did not have any trouble setting the resolutions this time. In the past, we have had some issues, but this time it worked flawlessly. It also worked flawlessly on the R9 290X as it has since we tested it the first time. In the case of both video cards, these both stitched the display together correctly the first time, without having to manipulate any software settings. Utilizing DisplayPort, configuration on both video cards is as easy as plugging it in, installing the drivers and playing games on the 4K display.