The Almost Titan: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Review

Of all the games we test with in our current suite, there is no other that’s likely to suck hundreds of hours out of your life than Skyrim. An expansive world, in-depth game mechanics, and the feeling that there’s always something to do… it’s no wonder the game has hit the right mark with so many people. While not the most graphically-intensive game, we like to test with it due to its popularity and the fact that it scales well in performance.

Manual Run-through: From the entry point in Markarth, our path leads us around the entire city, ultimately bringing us back to where we started.

Much like how DiRT: Showdown tends to run quite well on AMD hardware, Skyrim is much the same for NVIDIA, as is proven here. Despite the HD 7970 GHz keeping up to the GTX 780 well in most of our other tests, it falls behind even the GTX 680 here – except at 5760×1080 (and likely 4098×768 if I were able to run that resolution on the HD 7970). It’s certainly not the best game to bench with given how light it is on the GPU, but Skyrim still scales quite well.

Total War: SHOGUN 2

Strategy games are well-known for pushing the limits of any system, and few others do this as well as Total War: SHOGUN 2. It fully supports DX11, has huge battlefields to oversee with hundreds or thousands of units, and a ton of graphics options to adjust. It’s quite simply a beast of a game.

Manual Run-through: While we normally dislike timedemos, because strategy games such as this are very difficult to benchmark reliably, we’ve opted to use the built-in benchmark instead.

Finally, the game NVIDIA’s been long waiting for. Of all the games we bench with, I believe this to be the only one that doesn’t have an affiliation with either AMD or NVIDIA. You’d almost think otherwise given just how well it runs on NVIDIA hardware.