NVIDIA’s Hawaii-bound GeForce GTX 780 Ti Released

Hot on the heels of AMD’s Radeon R9 290 launch earlier this week comes NVIDIA with the world’s new fastest graphics card: GeForce GTX 780 Ti. Without question, this is a bit of an odd release, and one that seems to exist only because of AMD’s recent launches. However, its release has adjusted NVIDIA’s top-end lineup, which means you’re now able to get a lot of GPU horsepower for a lower price (the GTX 770 in particular @ $329 is an outstanding value proposition).

As you can see below, the actual cooler of the Ti card is little different from that of the GTX 770 and 780, though a bit of black has been splashed on.

As mentioned the other day, our review of this GPU and also AMD’s R9 290/290X will come a bit later (it’s looking like Monday at this point). For now, though, I can confidently say that the Ti is the fastest GPU ever released, even surpassing the $1,000 TITAN.

Versus TITAN, the GTX 780 Ti has more cores, a higher clock speed, and a higher GDDR5 speed. The major difference between the two cards is the drop from 6GB to 3GB, but I think it’s safe to say that 3GB will be suitable for most people for the foreseeable future (though I admit 4GB would be a definite sweet-spot for future-proofing’s sake).

Being that the Ti card is faster than TITAN, it might seem logical that TITAN will see a price-drop – not so. TITAN at its core isn’t so much a gamers’ card but a gamers’ card + computational card. TITAN has double-precision capabilities over the rest of its lineup, so even at $1,000, it still remains a rather good value for those that need it (NVIDIA’s Quadro cards of equivalent performance cost much more).

NVIDIA is pricing the GTX 780 Ti at $699, and it becomes eligible for its ongoing promotion that awards copies of Batman: Arkham Origins, Splinter Cell Blacklist, and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, in addition to a healthy $100 price drop off of a SHIELD (read our in-depth review).

Stay tuned for our full review of NVIDIA’s latest and greatest.