The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Review
by Ryan Smith on November 7, 2013 9:01 AM ESTHands On With NVIDIA's Shadowplay
Though it’s technically not part of the GeForce GTX 780 Ti launch, before diving into our typical collection of benchmarks we wanted to spend a bit of time looking at NVIDIA’s recently released Shadowplay utility.
Shadowplay was coincidentally enough first announced back at the launch of the GTX 780. Its designed purpose was to offer advanced game recording capabilities beyond what traditional tools like FRAPS could offer by leveraging NVIDIA image capture and video encode hardware. In doing so, Shadowplay would be able to offer similar capabilities with much less overhead, all the while also being able to utilize the NVENC hardware H.264 encoder to encode to space efficient H.264 rather than the bulky uncompressed formats traditional tools offer.
With Shadowplay and NVIDIA’s SHIELD streaming capabilities sharing so much of the underlying technology, the original plan was to launch Shadowplay in beta form shortly after SHIELD launched, however Shadowplay ended up being delayed, ultimately not getting its beta release until last week (October 28th). NVIDIA has never offered a full accounting for the delay, but one of the most significant reasons was because they were unsatisfied with their original video container choice, M2TS. M2TS containers, though industry standard and well suited for this use, have limited compatibility, with Windows Media Player in particular being a thorn in NVIDIA’s side. As such NVIDIA held back Shadowplay in order to convert it over to using MP4 containers, which have a very high compatibility rate at the cost of requiring some additional work on NVIDIA’s part.
In any case with the container issue resolved Shadowplay is finally out in beta, giving us our first chance to try out NVIDIA’s game recording utility. To that end while clearly still a beta and in need of further polishing and some feature refinements, at its most basic level we’ve come away impressed with Shadowplay, with NVIDIA having delivered on all of their earlier core promises for the utility
With regards to functionality, all of Shadowplay’s basic functionality is in. The utility offers two recording modes: a manual mode and a shadow mode, the former being self-explanatory while the latter being an always-active rolling buffer of up to 20 minutes that allows saving the buffer after the fact in a DVR-like fashion. Saving the shadow buffer causes the entirety of the buffer to be saved and a new buffer started, while manual mode can be started and stopped as desired.
Shadowplay Average Bitrates | |||
High Quality | 52Mbps | ||
Medium Quality |
23Mbps
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Low Quality |
16Mbps
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Next to being able to control the size of the shadow buffer, Shadowplay’s other piece of significant flexibility comes through the ability to set the quality (and therefore file size) of the recordings Shadowplay generates. Since Shadowplay uses lossy H.264 the recording bitrates will scale with the quality, with Shadowplay offering 3 quality levels: high (52Mbps), medium (23Mbps), and low (16Mbps). Choosing between the quality levels will depend on the quality needed and what the recording is intended for, due to the large difference in quality and size. High quality is as close as Shadowplay gets to transparent compression, and with its large file sizes is best suited for further processing/transcoding. Otherwise Medium and Low are low enough bitrates that they’re reasonably suitable for distribution as-is, however there is a distinct quality tradeoff in using these modes.
Moving on, at this moment while Shadowplay offers a range of quality settings for recording it only offers a single resolution and framerate: 1080p at 60fps. Neither the frame rate nor the resolution is currently adjustable, so whenever you record and despite the resolution you record from, it will be resized to 1920x1080 and recorded at 60fps. This unfortunately is an aspect-ratio unaware resize too, so even non-16:9 resolutions such as 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 will be resized to 1080p. Consequently at this time this is really the only weak point for Shadowplay; while the NVENC encoder undoubtedly presents some limitations, the inability to record at just a lower resolution or in an aspect ratio compliant manner is something we’d like to see NVIDIA expand upon in the final version of the utility.
Finally, let’s talk about performance. One of Shadowplay’s promises was that the overhead from recording would be very low – after all, it needs to be low enough to make always-on shadow mode viable – and this is another area where the product lives up to NVIDIA’s claims. To be sure there’s still some performance degradation from enabling Shadowplay, about 5% by our numbers, but this is small enough that it should be tolerable. Furthermore Shadowplay doesn’t require capping the framerate like FRAPS does, so it’s possible to use Shadowplay and still maintain framerates over 60fps. Though as to be expected, this will introduce some frame skipping in the captured video, since Shadowplay will have to skip some frames to keep within its framerate limitations.
On a related note, we did some digging for a technical answer for why Shadowplay performs as well as it does, and found our answer in an excellent summary of Shadowplay by Alexey Nicolaychuk, the author of RivaTuner and its derivatives (MSI Afterburner and EVGA Precision). As it turns out, although the NVENC video encoder plays a part in that – compressing the resulting video and making the resulting stream much easier to send back to the host and store – that’s only part of the story. The rest of Shadowplay’s low overhead comes from the fact that NVIDIA also has specific hardware and API support for the fast capture of frames built into Kepler GPUs. This functionality was originally intended to facilitate GRID and game streaming, which can also be utilized for game recording (after all, what is game recording but game streaming to a file instead of another client?).
This functionality is exposed as Frame Buffer Capture (NVFBC) and Inband Frame Readback (NVIFR). NVFBC allows Shadowplay to pull finished frames straight out of the frame buffer directly at a low level, as opposed to having to traverse the graphics APIs at a high level. Meanwhile NVIFR does have operate at a slightly higher level to inject itself into the graphics API, but in doing so it gains the flexibility to capture images from render targets as opposed to just frame buffers. Based on what we’re seeing we believe that NVIDIA is using NVFBC for Shadowplay, which would be the lowest overhead option while also explaining why Shadowplay can only capture full screen games and not windowed mode games, as frame buffer capturing is only viable when a game has exclusive control over the frame buffer.
Wrapping things up, it’s clear that NVIDIA still has some polishing they can apply to Shadowplay, and while they aren’t talking about the final release this soon, as a point of reference it took about 4 months for NVIDIA’s SHIELD game streaming component to go from beta to a formal, finished release. In the interim however it’s already in a very usable state, and it should be worth keeping an eye on in the future to see what else NVIDIA does to further improve the utility.
The Test
The press drivers for the launch of the GTX 780 Ti are release 331.70, which other than formally adding support for the new card is otherwise identical to the standing 331.65 drivers.
Meanwhile on a housekeeping note, we want to quickly point out that we’ll be deviating a bit from our normal protocol and including the 290X results for both normal (quiet) and uber modes. Typically we’d only include results from the default mode in articles such as these, but since we need to cover SLI/Crossfire performance and since we didn’t have 290X CF quiet mode results for our initial 290X review, we’re throwing in both so that we can compare the GTX 780 Ti to the 290X CF without being inconsistent by suddenly switching to the lower performance quiet mode numbers. Though with that said, for the purposes of our evaluation we will be focusing almost entirely on the quiet mode numbers, given the vast difference in both performance and noise that comes from using it.
CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon R9 290X AMD Radeon R9 290 XFX Radeon R9 280X Double Dissipation AMD Radeon HD 7990 AMD Radeon HD 7970 NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 |
Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA Release 331.58 WHQL NVIDIA Release 331.70 Beta AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta v1 AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta v5 AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta v8 |
OS: | Windows 8.1 Pro |
302 Comments
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polaco - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
Indeed that's exactly the way I see it. AMD has played it's cards quite well this time. NVidia seems to be on it's price knees and can't compete any way. NVidia needs a new GPU to compete with Hawaii. I don't want to put into cosideration Mantle, TrueAudio, Gsync nor the Shield discount.Mantle and TrueAudio hasn't been demoed yet.
Shield seems like a waste of money and almost useless for me.
Maybe in a future if they prove to be worthy we will see Mantle, TrueAudio and Gsync to be included as part of an upgrade other standards.
Gigaplex - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Only 5% faster than a $1000 card? Yeah, totally overpriced at $700.Sarcasm aside, it really is overpriced. But comparing it to the Titan to justify that claim doesn't work.
polaco - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
Well looking at Anand's benchmarks I can't find a way to justify spending such amount of money on this card. AMD 290 and 290X looks way more interesting. As difference to others reviews Anand's has focused only in ultra high resolutions I think that's the way to go. Since no one would buy one of this cards (780ti, 290X) to game at 1680x1050. So at this high resolutions performances differences between the cards are barely minimal in most cases and could be reduced even more by drivers updates or settings tunning. I find no reason to spend such a difference for 780 Ti while having more than decent performance from radeon 290 at 250 bucks less. If I would want to go to an extreme instead of aquiring a 780Ti it would be better and get 2xradeon290 for 100 bucks more. So the problem of 780Ti is it's price, pure and simple. I really find difficult NVidia could lower the prices more since it looks 290 and 290X launch has putted NVidia prices to it's knees. So far I'm still waiting for 290, 290X third party coolers if they are good they can even pair or overcome 290 and 290X performance against 780Ti. What I have no doubt is how Titan and 780 early buyers must be feeling at this moment...j6z7 - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
I think the majority of comments here reveals the truth behind big headlines with reviews.The reference 290X with 10 year old reference cooler still beating the 780ti with best cooler in CF - and it does it being $300 cheaper too!
If anything, Nvidia shot itself in the foot against its own Titan.
Nvidia fans will continue to support the company in ripping people off, while AMD provides same performance at affordable prices.
End of the day, people who'll buy the 290X will be much more satisfied customers.
The End.
Mondozai - Friday, December 13, 2013 - link
Nvidia fanboys like EJS1980 are like battered wives. They are trying to rationalize themselves being raped.b3nzint - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
You must be pissed with 290x being priced that low. Anyway AMD should reconsider for using that blower type fan. Nvidia have better cooling system than AMD, but for that price i just don't care. For $700? still too much.b3nzint - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
what about mantle, compute power and trueaudio? u don't buy gpu for just friggin fps number!wwwcd - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
WoW Ryan cut my comment. I know he is a really hard green fen, but this censor not placed with democracy. I can revenge of m-r Anand!Ryan Smith - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
Uh, we haven't deleted anything. Are you sure you haven't just misplaced your comment?not_there - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
I'm not a gamer, but I like to put a decent video card in my builds to run Folding@Home. It's real science and it helps heat my basement. Reading the reviews here I'm confused (someone point out what I'm missing). In a June review of the GTX 760 the Radeon HD 7970 got a 36.1 and in this review, the same card on the same test got a 29.3. This was the Folding@Home Explicit, Single Precision benchmark. June number for the GTX 770 in this test was 35.6 and in the same test on the same card in this review the benchmark is 15.1. Why the difference?