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GTX 780 Lightning VS. R9 290X Lightning @ 1080p

Soldato
Joined
7 May 2006
Posts
12,192
Location
London, Ealing
Rtsurfer and I decided to have a friendly Lightning vs. Lightning competition. Because of monitor/TV limitations we are only testing 1080p today. We also have different PC configurations, so we had to make some changes to make this as equal as we can. Rtsurfer disabled HT on his 4770K and dropped the cpu clocks to 4.6GHz. He also bumped his memory speeds down a little. We are using different operating systems as well, but the performance difference for the games we benched is negligible. We only benched games that have built-in benchmarks. This leaves very little room for variation between runs. See the system specs below.

Rtsurfer's Rig

Core i7 4770K @ 4.6GHz (HT Disabled)
GSkill Trident X @ 2133MHz 10-12-12-31 8GB
Asus Z87 Maximus VI Hero
Windows 8.1 Pro
MSI R9 290X Lightning 4GB – Stock cooler

Face2Face's Rig

Core i5 3570K @ 4.8GHz
Samsung 32nm @ 1866MHz 9-9-9-24 16GB
Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H
Windows 7 Pro
MSI GTX 780 Lightning 3GB – NZXT G10 bracket with TT Water 3.0

We benched all of the games below at three different clock speeds for each card.

Out of the box clock speeds

R9 290X Lighting stock boost clocks = 1080MHz core and 1250MHz memory
GTX 780 Lightning stock boost clocks = 1124MHz core and 1502MHz memory

We also wanted to measure clock per clock performance as well. Because of the memory interface differences the memory bandwidth is not equal.

R9 290X Lightning = 1189MHz core and 1603MHz on the memory
GTX 780 Lightning = 1189MHz core and 1603MHz on the memory

Last, we wanted to run both of our cards at their Max OC.

R9 290X Lighting = 1260MHz core and 1625MHz on the memory
GTX 780 Lightning = 1450MHz core and 1656MHz on the memory

Now the GTX 780 wasn’t blessed with Hynix or Samsung memory, so it’s scaling beyond 1300MHz+ on the core leaves little to be desired. I would also think its performance would be impacted more so as the resolution increases beyond 1080p. This is due to lack of memory bandwidth.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2384167
 
Man of Honour
Joined
13 Oct 2006
Posts
90,821
Judging by the AO result looks like the gtx wasn't on latest drivers? plus different OS, not entirely fair but an impressive clock on that 780.

EDIT: Oh I see they noted the problem with the AO result.
 
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Soldato
Joined
6 Feb 2010
Posts
14,591
If there's anything to take out of this, it is how ridculous that us consumers are willingly spending so much money for so little performance difference (780, 290x, 780Ti) to the point that's probably not noticable at all in actual gaming environment :p

290 is an exception though, because comparing to the 3 cards above, it is in a league of its own on bang for bucks.
 
Soldato
Joined
30 Dec 2011
Posts
5,420
Location
Belfast
Nice testing, thanks for this. It shows very well that pretty much any card from the top end will be so close in performance that it comes down to the silicone lottery.

Both these cards are designed to be OC monsters.
 
Mobster
Soldato
Joined
13 Sep 2013
Posts
2,591
Nice testing, thanks for this. It shows very well that pretty much any card from the top end will be so close in performance that it comes down to the silicone lottery.

Both these cards are designed to be OC monsters.

MSI put a TDP limit on these cards, even on the LN2 bios. Reference cards are better "OC Monsters"
 
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