Move Aside, GTX 680: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 Review

Battlefield 3 is a rare treat when it comes to PC gaming. Rather than develop the game for the consoles first and then port over to the PC, DICE built the game with the PC in mind from the get-go. It’s graphically one of the most impressive games ever created, so it’s of little surprise that it finds itself in our testing.

Manual Run-through: Operation Guillotine (chapter 5) is the basis for our benchmarking here, as it features a lot of smoke, water, debris and is reliable to benchmark repeatedly. Our run starts us at the top of a hill, where we immediately rise up and run down it. We make our way down to the riverbed below, and end our run once we hit the first set of stairs.

Things have kicked-off to a great start here, with the GTX 770 handily beating out the GTX 680 it replaces in each one of the tests. It does fall a bit behind AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, but NVIDIA has pricing on its side to take care of that.

DiRT: Showdown

For so many reasons, the DiRT series is one of the best out there for racing fans. Each game offers outstanding graphics and audio, excellent control and environments that are way too much fun to tear up. Showdown is an interesting beast, as it features destructive racing, but as we discovered in our review, it too is a ton of fun.

Manual Run-through: In our search for the perfect Showdown track to test with, we found that any of the snow levels offered the greatest stress on a GPU. The specific track we chose is the second race in the second tier, taking place in Colorado. We begin our FPS recording as soon as the countdown to the race begins, and end it as soon as we hit the finish line at the end of the three-lap race.

AMD’s 7970 GHz takes the cake here – even against the GTX 780 – with the GTX 770 surpassing the performance of the GTX 680 ever-so-slightly.