According to our newest data, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 780 Ti is much faster than Radeon R9 290X.
This was confirmed by multiple leaks already, including synthetic benchmarks or some preliminary gaming tests. Today I have some official scores of both cards confronted with each other with the most popular gaming titles.
There are two things that you should know before making any final judgments here. First is that NVIDIA used 2560×1600 resolution for the most of these games. This is very important since AMD clearly targets 4k resolution in their tests. NVIDIA says that if you want to play on 4k resolution, then you need at least two cards in SLI.
Secondly AMD Radeon R9 290X was used in Quiet mode, this is even more important, since it would perform 8-12% better in these tests. I could have added ‘possible’ results based on this knowledge, but I didn’t want to make data out of thin air. Let’s keep it as it is. Most of you would probably use Uber mode for this comparison, but since we are talking about official scores, NVIDIA had to make sure 290X will look (much) worse.
Testing platform: Intel Core i7-3960X, Windows 8.1 64-bit, GeForce 331.70 drivers, Catalyst 13.11 Beta 8
Conclusion
According to the official data NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti would perform 30% better than 290X. Of course we are looking at the numbers from NVIDIA, so it’s necessary to take these numbers with a grain of salt. I was told that in ‘real’ benchmarks GeForce GTX 780 Ti is about 20% faster than 290X in Quiet Mode. In Uber Mode R9 290X is still slower than 780 Ti, but only by 13%. If we add 4k benchmarks this number will get even better in AMD favor.