Hot on the heels of the all-powerful Titan’s release just a few months ago, Nvidia is now plowing forward into the its 700 series with the sweet new GTX 780. It’s a Titan-esque bad-boy that’s a little bit cheaper.
The 780 and is starting that final push of 700-series cards that will take Kepler to its limits before Maxwell bursts on the scene in 2014. Compared to Titan, the GTX 780 is just a little bit behind, with 3GB of memory to Titan’s 6GB and 2304 cores to Titan’s 2688. And of course, they both still lose out to the GTX 690’s dual-wielding GPU approach.
Still, the 780 is a powerful sucker, and more than worthy of ushering in the 700 series. And it also comes with some other swanky features like a new adaptive temperature controller that minimises fan speed fluctuations, so the fan’s not only quiet, but it doesn’t oscillate nearly as much as it would otherwise. And we all know it’s those wild pitch changes that really piss you off.
The 780’s launch also comes hand-in-hand with GeForce Experience’s emergence from its beta-cocoon. And to celebrate that release, Nvidia is rolling out a new Experience feature called Shadowplay, which perpetually records the last 20 minutes of game-time for playback. Like a dashcam for screen-capture, Shadowplay can capture the last 20 minutes of your play at all times using Kepler’s H.264 encoder to minimise any performance decrease and keep the footage nice and small, around 5MB for every three minutes or so of 1080p footage.
If you’re into all that GTX 780 goodness, you can expect it to hit the market this summer, but it won’t come cheap exactly. At $US650, it’s not outlandishly expensive, but it’s still a pretty big chunk of change. But it’s not short on power to back it up.