ASUS GeForce GTX 780 Ti DirectCU II Review
Test System and 3DMark Benchmarks
How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the ASUS GeForce GTX 780 Ti DirectCU II in this article on a Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 motherboard powered by an Intel Core i5 3570K quad-core processor and 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1866 RAM. We installed Windows 8.1 Enterprise 64-bit onto a pair of Intel 730 Series 480GB solid state drives (SSDs) configured in a RAID 0 array. Once that was complete, we fully updated the OS and installed the latest DirectX redistributable along with all of the drivers, games, and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests. Since we're also interested in 4K gaming performance, we ran the tests on a Dell UltraSharp UP3214Q 4K Ultra HD monitor.
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 3DMark 11
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Although Futuremark’s 3DMark 11 has been around for several years, it still provides a good look at gaming capabilities. We ran this benchmark on the Performance preset at 1280 x 720 resolution at on the Extreme Preset at 1920x1080. |
Let's also not forget that the ASUS' card runs $690 street, which ties with MSI for the least expensive GeForce GTX 780 Ti around.
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Fire Strike has two benchmark modes: Normal mode runs in 1920x1080, while Extreme mode targets 2560x1440. GPU target frame buffer utilization for normal mode is 1GB and the benchmark uses tessellation, ambient occlusion, volume illumination, and a medium-quality depth of field filter. The more taxing Extreme mode targets 1.5GB of frame buffer memory and increases detail levels across the board. Extreme mode is explicitly designed for CrossFire / SLI systems. GT 1 focuses on geometry and illumination, with over 100 shadow casting spot lights, 140 non-shadow casting point lights, and 3.9 million vertices calculated for tessellation per frame. And 80 million pixels are processed per frame. GT2 emphasizes particles and GPU simulations. Tessellation volume is reduced to 2.6 million vertices and the number of pixels processed per frame rises to 170 million. |
The rest of our 3DMark benchmark runs showed the same tendencies -- the DirectCU II, with its slower clockspeeds, had it trailing the competition. Bear in mind that in some cases, we're talking about less than a single frame per second difference between ASUS and both MSI and EVGA.
