NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 Review With Gigabyte & MSI
Test System and Unigine Heaven v4.0
How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the graphics cards in this article on an Asus P9X79 Deluxe motherboard powered by a Core i7-3960X six-core processor and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR3-1866 RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the system UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" default settings and disable any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The memory's X.M.P. profile was enabled to ensure better-than-stock performance and the hard drive was then formatted and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the installation was complete, we fully updated the OS and installed the latest DirectX redist along with all of the drivers, games, and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.
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Hardware Used: |
Relevant Software: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 DirectX April 2011 Redist AMD Catalyst v13.5B NVIDIA GeForce Drivers v314.09/v320.14 Benchmarks Used: Unigine Heaven v4 3DMark "Fire Strike" Batman: Arkham City Hitman: Absolution Alien vs. Predator Metro 2033 Sleeping Dogs Crysis 3 FRAPS + FCAT |
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Unigine's Heaven Benchmark v4.0 is built around the Unigine game engine. Unigine is a cross-platform, real-time 3D engine, with support for DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11 and OpenGL. The Heaven benchmark--when run in DX11 mode--also makes comprehensive use of tessellation technology and advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion). It also features volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm and a dynamic sky with light scattering. |
The reference GeForce GTX 770 and factory overclocked cards from Gigabyte and MSI performed exactly as expected in the Unigine Heaven benchmark. All three of the GTX 770 cards finished ahead of the GeForce GTX 680, and they outpaced the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition too. The highest clocked card--MSI's GeForce GTX Lightning--just barely edged past Gigabyte's offering, which itself outpaced the reference card by a few percentage points.
