Where does Kepler stand today?

[poofyhairguy]

Wow at the 7970 beating the OG Titan! Somewhere someone sold a 7970 to pay hundreds more for an OG Titan.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Somewhere someone sold a 7970 to pay hundreds more for an OG Titan.

Hilarious, isn't it?

 

[MrTeal]

Clearly i dont know where exactly in Europe you live, so perhaps the prices are bit different over there, but where i live, this is reality:

https://www.alza.sk/gf-gtx980ti/18856136.htm#f&cst=0&pg=1&pn=1&sc=100

670 EUROs cheapest model of GTX980Ti and even that with 8 percent off for last past few days, i dont think there was one under 700 before over the course of past 2 months, since i started to check. The average price i would say is about 750 and there are quite a lot variants in 800 - 850 range (the ones with better cooling)...

Now i dont keep exact prices of 780Ti from 2 or 3 years ago to support my claim, but we have one at work and i recall it was in 500 - 600 EUROs without VAT, when we bought it few years back - bottom line, it was definitely not more expensive than 980Ti is now. If anything, slightly cheaper, but i would say, mostly equal.

The price increase, which we refer to and you seem to dismiss, happened at the Fermi/Kepler generation change anyway. So what happened since 780Ti is a moot point anyway.

EDIT: Lol, Sweden. My bad. Anyway, i checked some swedish store, komplett.se, not sure how good or big is, but the cheapest 980Ti over there is 6990 swedish crowns, which i believe is about 750 EUROs. So the prices i guess in Sweden are at best about the same as here, if not actually higher.

EDIT no. 2.: I accessed the older page version of local computer store site (the one i linked above with 980Ti prices) via Wayback sites, specifically from November 2013, when 780Ti was a new thing:

https://web.archive.org/web/2013111...s-cipem-nvidia-geforce-gtx780-ti/18854777.htm

the prices were, as you can see, about 650 - 700 EUROs. So what "corresponding decline" are we talking about? And dont want me to link GTX580 prices from 2010/2011.

In November 2013 700 Euro was worth ~US$950. Today 800 Euro is US$875. Prices haven't really risen, your currency has just devalued relative to the USD.

 

[Ferzerp]

I know you ask about the 780ti specifically, but Kepler in general fares poorly. SLI 680s are pretty much unusable for many things today in 2GB form. When new, they were the fastest thing available, but now too many newer games make them choke because of VRAM exhaustion while they still have lots of compute power left.

 

[3DVagabond]

Wow at the 7970 beating the OG Titan! Somewhere someone sold a 7970 to pay hundreds more for an OG Titan.

I can remember the 680/770 being pushed as superior to the 7970 and it's 20% slower, once they take out the benches that propped it's performance up. We had artificially inflated performance graphs for nVidia then and we still do now.

How is the 390X so competitive with the 980 now when it killed the 290X on release? It's not because AMD didn't have optimized drivers then. It's the game selection and settings used.

We have everyone touting O/C'ing and custom cards for 980/ti today but when the 290X was compared it was reference on "quiet mode" that was the only fair comparison.

nVidia's "support" (read money) skews everything.

 

[Railgun]

My OG Titans hold up very well tyvm.

 

[ultima_trev]

We had artificially inflated performance graphs for nVidia then and we still do now.

We can thank TWIMTBP and now more so Gameworks for that. Soon games using Gameworks tech will require a current GTX x80 GPU for 1080P 30FPS High Settings and GTX Titan XYZ for 60FPS. SLI for Ultra.

But a heavily discounted 780 Ti (under 225$) is a great deal since it gives roughly R9 390 performance.

 

[Actaeon]

I think it hasn't been harsh enough. Using 290X is a cop-out since most people skipped 290X entirely and just got the 290. The comparison should really be 1x 290 or 2x290 vs. 780Ti. Either case makes 780Ti look horrendous. 780Ti was like taking $300 and flushing it into the toilet because back when 290/780Ti were battling it out, they were fast enough for older titles and now when you need the extra performance, 780Ti has nothing to show for that $300 spent.

Worse yet, $1400 780Ti SLI barely outperforms stock reference thermal throttling $800 290 CF. When you start looking at things from this point of view, 780Ti is one of the worst overpriced flagship cards. It cost way too much, and didn't deliver at all. At least when one max overclocked the 580, in the most demanding games it smacked 6970.

It'll be interesting to revisit next year to see how 3GB of VRAM and DX12 will impact 780Ti. I have a feeling it'll continue to age even worse.

I guess you can make the argument that someone who paid $650-700 for a 780Ti doesn't care about how well a card performs in 2 years or how much value it lost since they already moved on to 980Ti and they aren't exactly price sensitive. You'd have a point there. :thumbsup:

I think we are in agreement on most points but maybe we see it differently. I think we both agree the 780 Ti was expensive at launch and more expensive than the competitors, no need to rehash that.

Performance wise, compared to the AMD flagship (290X) it was faster for the first year but AMD was able to find some improvements since launch so they are equal today. We can find certain benchmarks, settings, and resolutions where one card will do better than the other but in general a 290X and 780 Ti will provide a similar experience. At 1080p and some 1440p, both of them still capable of running games with high settings and decent framerates.

As it sits today, the 780 Ti is still the 3rd fastest consumer card Nvidia has made (I don't count Titan as consumer). The 980 Ti and 980 are faster and about the same as a 970. For a two year old card I'd say that is OK.

So if there is two 'grades' to give these cards, one for value and one for performance, it is fair to say in terms of value the 780 Ti hasn't held up as well as the competition. I think it is also fair to say that when evaluating strictly by performance it is still a very capable card. To some people having the best card for about a year is worth the premium over 290X or Maxwell, but that is up to each person to judge.

I also agree it'll be interesting to see how 3GB of VRAM affects the card as we move forward. 4GB is the sweet spot for high end cards right now.

 

[Headfoot]

Titan is a consumer chip (so-called pro-sumer). It ships with consumer drivers. You still have to quadruple the price to step up to the real professional chips that ship with the separate set of professional drivers, e.g. Quadros and Teslas. Its a consumer chip with the trappings of a pro chip, extra VRAM and DP on the OG Titan. Titan X doesn't even have that to claim.

 

[dogen1]

Wow at the 7970 beating the OG Titan! Somewhere someone sold a 7970 to pay hundreds more for an OG Titan.

Well, they did get a few years of better performance.

 

[darckhart]

I can say for sure that my OG Titan stumbles on TWIMTBP/GW games. Even if I disable those features, it seems like the game code wasn't optimized for without it, so I get frequent CTD or "driver recovered" errors. Unless you know for sure you're gonna play games that dont have any GW bits in it, I'd say you're better off looking at a new/used 970. or if you wanna save, snag a used 290/x.

 

[3DVagabond]

I can say for sure that my OG Titan stumbles on TWIMTBP/GW games. Even if I disable those features, it seems like the game code wasn't optimized for without it, so I get frequent CTD or "driver recovered" errors. Unless you know for sure you're gonna play games that dont have any GW bits in it, I'd say you're better off looking at a new/used 970. or if you wanna save, snag a used 290/x.

What makes you believe that it won't be rinse/repeat when Pascal comes out in a few months? I wouldn't trust them to not do the same thing again.