 HotSpot Shield service makes your internet browsing safer, more secure, and fully private. Click now to learn more. There are a few things that get us more excited around here than high-end graphics card launches, and as far as single GPUs go, the GTX 780 Ti is about as high-end as it gets. We'll start with the tech specs. It has the same GK110 lineage and Titan DNA as the GTX Titan, and the GTX 780. It also has a full 2,880 CUDA cores. That is 25% more than GTX 780. That is a full-fledged GK110 core. It is clocked at an 875 base clock, 928 boost clock clock speed, meaning we have not only more CUDA cores, but also higher clock speeds, and it comes with 3GB of GDDR5 memory at 7GHz on a 384-bit bus. So we're actually getting faster memory as well. Physically, the card looks pretty darn similar to the last gen. So there's two SLI connectors with support for two, three, or four-way SLI. You've got that same acoustically optimized fan with the slow ramp up and down so that it's less jarring when it has to speed up or slow down. We've got a cast aluminum shroud with dark aluminum fins visible through the polycarbonate window. So those are mounted on a vapor chamber that takes heat away from the GPU. On the back of the card, we have two dual-link DVI ports, HDMI and display port, now with support for 4K and triple surround. However, I maintain that this is pretty expensive and kind of irrelevant right now. I think it's just a feature checkbox that they want to have compared to the competition. We've yet to see a gaming rig with a 4K monitor on it posted on the Linus Tech Tips forum, so I'm just not convinced that it exists yet. At the bottom, we find a PCI Express 3.0 16x connector, and then at the top, to correspond with that 250 watt TDP, we've got an 8-pin and 6-pin power connector. The cooler is a blower-style design, so while a little bit of heat is going to be exhausted out the back of the card into your case, most of it is going to be exhausted out the rear of your PC case so that it doesn't affect the cooling of your other components. We've got the usual suspects in terms of in-game technology, DirectX 11, Ambient Occlusion, TXAA, Tessellation, Fizz X, and there are some upcoming games and hot new titles that support these features on the screen right now, hopefully. There's no mention, funnily enough, of 3D vision, but don't worry, guys, it's still very much supported. I just guessed that that particular trend didn't take off the way that TV manufacturers and some other folks hoped that it would. G-Sync, on the other hand, is a game changer. It looks dramatically better when the frame rate is variable at all, which happens in every game as you move from more or less demanding scenes and in between them. It dynamically adapts the refresh rate of your monitor, that is how many images per second, according to the frame rate actually being output from your GPU. Now, it does rely on hardware support, but we're expecting to see monitors sometime in 2014. You'll also need a Kepler-based GPU, and hopefully, from the manufacturers that you see here that are already partnered up, we're going to see great high resolution, high refresh rate designs with a variety of different panel types, whether it's TN or IPS or whatever else, and these are going to come in at reasonable prices, because trust me, guys, I'm one of the several people on Earth that's actually seen this. It is amazing, and once you try it, you are going to want it. GPU Boost 2.0 functionality has been tweaked somewhat with their power balancing feature, and Luke will tell you more about that after, but fundamentally, the technology hasn't changed much. So it's monitoring voltage, temperatures, power consumption, and clock speeds in order to deliver the most balanced performance at any given time without exceeding any of those parameters. Now, there's a difference between how AMD views balanced performance and how Nvidia views balanced performance with this generation. It runs substantially cooler and much quieter than the R9 290 series, but there were some things that we didn't necessarily like about this implementation. There's very limited control in terms of voltages and power limits. It gives us a whopping 106% power limit maximum, and even with things like temperature settings, it seems to be ignoring what we say anyway. We set a maximum of 95 degrees because we were like, go to town. I mean, AMD set 95 degrees, let's run it at 95 degrees. It didn't run at 95 degrees. So it just ran at 83 degrees. So it doesn't even seem to, it seems to be taking our input as suggestions. With that said, we still achieved over 1200 megahertz on the core. So that is one hell of an overclock and very beastly performance, as you guys are going to see. So maybe it just runs at 83 degrees, and that's all there is to it. This could be partly due to the larger die as well as the more mature design. So a larger die allows you to inherently spread the heat out more easily using the heat sink. GeForce Experience continues to get updates, but first the stuff that hasn't been changed. It still gives you automatic driver updates. So you get a little notification in the corner. Hey, you got that new game. Hey, there's a new driver to go with it. Make sure you install that. Yay. It also gives you optimized settings for your games. And there's actually quite a complicated process to determine these. Actual people sit there and play the game, find benchmarkable segments that are demanding. Then they determine a target frame rate for these demanding segments, weigh graphics settings against each other, you know, play around with the sliders. Well, does this actually make it look that much better? And how hard is it for the graphics hardware to handle? And then they find the best settings that satisfy the FPS target and still make it look as good as possible. Then they run all that information through automated validation across thousands of hardware configurations in order to deliver you a playable gaming experience. I've tried it and it works. I ended up tweaking a couple of things further. But the great thing about GeForce Experience is that you can have it deliver better graphical fidelity to high end gamers who don't want to tinker with things. You can have it help low end gamers like you can see this example with a GT540M, achieve playable frame rates even on low end machines. And most importantly, for people like me who are going to tweak things anyway, you can install it, then completely ignore it and do everything manually through the driver. Now on to the newer stuff. Now, these next two features do require a GTX 650 or up. You have to have a Kepler GPU with a built-in H.264 encoder, but man are they cool. Game stream is awesome. I've been using an Nvidia Shield to play Batman Arkham City because I'm a little bit behind on the Batman franchise. Using the GTX Titan in my desktop PC and then a very solid wireless router. Guys, a beast wireless router is required. I'm using Asus ACN66U or whatever it is, but it is amazing. PC grade graphics on a handheld or with their new console mode for Shield, you can stream them to your TV at 720p or 1080p with an upcoming patch that's coming later on. And when you factor in that with high end graphics cards, 770 and up, you can get $100 off a Shield. That's a $200 add-on that is essentially a PC game console adapter thing for your TV and a handheld that can stream from your PC. It's pretty freaking awesome. And then next up is ShadowPlay. Right now it supports local recording only, although Twitch streaming integrated into your graphics card driver essentially is coming soon. It records at 60 FPS at up to 1080p, so it's better than most standalone hardware recorders. And it can just record passively in the background. So you can kind of go, oh, well, that was awesome. I want to grab that. And you can actually retroactively grab up to 20 minutes of pre-recorded footage in Windows 8 using their passive ShadowPlay mode. Or you can have unlimited recording in manual mode. Now, it's not perfect. It's like not perfect yet by all means. But I mean, there's no OpenGL support, so no Minecraft, guys. But it has very, very small file sizes. And the quality looks great. And it is a negligible, less than 10% performance impact. So it's something that you can actually have running all the time, which is very, very cool for game streamers compared to software recording like for apps. So that's it for the tech. Now on to performance. We ran all of our graphics cards on our standard overclocked 3960x test bench. All video cards were overclocked as usual. If you want stock benchmarks, there are 100 other guys that do things that way. So go for it. Go look at their benchmarks. You can see our overclocking settings in the Google Doc linked in the video description. If you have any questions about how we overclock the graphics cards or what frequencies they're running at, we recorded frame rates using Fraps after giving each graphics card a few minutes to warm up in game. This is important because the way GPU Boost 2.0 and Powertune adjust performance based on temperatures, it's a necessary step for getting accurate GPU performance. So without further ado, over to Luke. Just so you guys know, the overclocking doc is linked in the description below and has all of our settings for all of our cards. And just in case you haven't seen it yet, on the far right side, there's a new column that we introduced a little while ago called Core Clock Actual, which is displaying our observed clock speeds for the cards with GPU Boost 2.0 and all these new technologies. They happen to throw back quite easily. So what we're showing is not what we set it at, what we're showing is what it's actually performing as. And our card is performing quite well at 1256. Now that's with an offset of plus 250. If I ignored the crashing that I was having in Tomb Raider at higher clock speeds, I was pushing easily 300. The charts have been pretty self-explanatory thus far, with the 70 Ti pretty much crushing everything, although that does make sense due to its much higher price point, that's something that you have to keep in mind. The question that is most likely on quite a few of your minds is what happened to the Titan? A, it's not in your benchmarks. B, it's a slower card. C, it's much more expensive. Well, it's kind of a developer's card now, it's not really a gaming card anymore. It has that double precision feature on it, which is kind of awesome for certain developers that can actually utilize it. And other than that, it's just kind of sitting up there by itself. If you're looking for an extremely high end gaming card and you were looking at the Titan, I would maybe divert your focus to the 70 Ti. You may need that 6 gigs of RAM. I have noticed in some of our higher resolution benchmarks that it is starting to utilize a lot of the RAM and getting fairly close to its max, although not that close, mind you. So one thing to do if you need that extra RAM might be wait a little while and see if there's different versions of the 70 Ti coming on later. We have no idea, but I hope there is because that would be very interesting. I'm sure a debate that will go on is, is this card overkill for 1080p? I would not say quite yet. In Far Cry 3 and Crysis 3, with all the settings max, we don't get our average FPS over 60. And I would personally think that the perfect 1080p experience would be 60 FPS plus. And with Star Citizen on the horizon, we don't know what's going to happen there, but it's probably going to push it even harder. So I could still see this card being justified for 1080p, but I might want to go a little bit higher. And where this card really shows its prowess is in the higher resolutions. Our 2560 by 1600 benchmarks were very impressive, although again, in Crysis 3, we saw a little bit sub 30 for our average FPS. So I would love to see two of these cards in the SLI start crushing games in those higher resolutions. This card is kicking butt and taking names, but it definitely comes with a price tag. In the comments below, are you going to be looking for a card like this with a premium price tag, but with that level of experience? Or are you going to go for something more like, say, an R9 290 where you can save a bunch of money and it's a little bit hot and heavy, but you're still getting a lot of performance out of it? What do you guys think? If you like this video, like the video. If you dislike this video, dislike this video. And as always, please subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.