TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

I think 780Ti's are going to be very expensive cards someday. Like they will be the V5 5500 of this era when they are approachin […]
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I think 780Ti's are going to be very expensive cards someday. Like they will be the V5 5500 of this era when they are approaching the age the V5s are now. All due to Windows XP support, proper DX9 support (Maxwell cards are shit at DX9 in most titles), CSAA support, they were some of the last cards to have analog capable DVI ports, and they were the most powerful of that final generation.

I've still got a PNY GeForce GTX 780Ti XLR8 Community Edition 3GB card inside my main gaming rig. They are still very viable. Unfortunately NVIDIA is scummy as hell and even though they were 10 percent faster than 970s in all titles when they were new, now due to NVIDIA gimping the drivers for Kepler and not porting improvements and optimizations over to the Kepler end of the deal (even though there are still TONS of Kepler cards in use) they are now 10 percent slower than a 970. I can confirm this isn't just rumour as well, I have another rig that is literally identical except it has a GTX 970 4GB SCC ACX2 (part of the reason they are losing ground might be related to memory limitations, honestly) and my 780ti rig is losing more and more ground on it in new titles as time goes on.

Such a beautiful card. Seriously they don't make them this well anymore. White LEDS inside clear fans, with an aluminum shroud and jet black backplate.

I agree with most of what you said -- I don't own one but looking at the specs and benchmarks the 780 ti and Titan Black are almost identical besides the Titan Black having double the VRAM.

How about the GTX 750 / 750Ti? They're maxwell based but often I see them recommended over the kepler 650, even in retro-gaming circles.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

I think 780Ti's are going to be very expensive cards someday. Like they will be the V5 5500 of this era when they are approachin […]
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I think 780Ti's are going to be very expensive cards someday. Like they will be the V5 5500 of this era when they are approaching the age the V5s are now. All due to Windows XP support, proper DX9 support (Maxwell cards are shit at DX9 in most titles), CSAA support, they were some of the last cards to have analog capable DVI ports, and they were the most powerful of that final generation.

I've still got a PNY GeForce GTX 780Ti XLR8 Community Edition 3GB card inside my main gaming rig. They are still very viable. Unfortunately NVIDIA is scummy as hell and even though they were 10 percent faster than 970s in all titles when they were new, now due to NVIDIA gimping the drivers for Kepler and not porting improvements and optimizations over to the Kepler end of the deal (even though there are still TONS of Kepler cards in use) they are now 10 percent slower than a 970. I can confirm this isn't just rumour as well, I have another rig that is literally identical except it has a GTX 970 4GB SCC ACX2 (part of the reason they are losing ground might be related to memory limitations, honestly) and my 780ti rig is losing more and more ground on it in new titles as time goes on.

Such a beautiful card. Seriously they don't make them this well anymore. White LEDS inside clear fans, with an aluminum shroud and jet black backplate.

In which games are Kepler better or significantly different than Maxwell? I have heard it said a few time in this thread, but I have never experienced it myself.

infiniteclouds wrote:

Have there actually been any discovered benefits of Fermi over say... Kepler?

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

I think 780Ti's are going to be very expensive cards someday.

Something which put me off holding onto any card between the GTX670 - GTX780ti (excluding the Maxwell based GTX 750) is the sheer amount of heat they generate, they will turbo hard until they hit 80c, then vary clockspeed to stay at 80c! Even the blower style cards radiate extreme heat to chipsets and other nearby components which can be very tricky to keep cool in such a scenario. No BIOS editing tool seems able to cure this and I tried hard before writing them off.
The GTX 660 doesn't suffer from this, nor do any of the Maxwell cards which came afterwards. I've yet to find any problems with Maxwell under XP with the final drivers or any XP title which the GTX 960 didn't run with aplomb.
You can keep your GTX 780ti, it's a powerful card but comes with a compromise that isn't necessary.

ninkeo wrote:

How about the GTX 750 / 750Ti? They're maxwell based but often I see them recommended over the kepler 650, even in retro-gaming circles.

it's recommended because it tends to be a lot faster than Kepler with the same power usage (under 75W, no need for additional power connector, also it tends to use a small PCB), also it was very popular, so it's probably a good card to find for little $.

also the regular 650 was pretty weak, the 650 Ti Boost was more interesting but far less common,
the Radeons 7700 and 7800 were nicer options at the time at least.

BushLin wrote:

Something which put me off holding onto any card between the GTX670 - GTX780ti (excluding the Maxwell based GTX 750) is the shee […]
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infiniteclouds wrote:

Have there actually been any discovered benefits of Fermi over say... Kepler?

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

I think 780Ti's are going to be very expensive cards someday.

Something which put me off holding onto any card between the GTX670 - GTX780ti (excluding the Maxwell based GTX 750) is the sheer amount of heat they generate, they will turbo hard until they hit 80c, then vary clockspeed to stay at 80c! Even the blower style cards radiate extreme heat to chipsets and other nearby components which can be very tricky to keep cool in such a scenario. No BIOS editing tool seems able to cure this and I tried hard before writing them off.
The GTX 660 doesn't suffer from this, nor do any of the Maxwell cards which came afterwards. I've yet to find any problems with Maxwell under XP with the final drivers or any XP title which the GTX 960 didn't run with aplomb.
You can keep your GTX 780ti, it's a powerful card but comes with a compromise that isn't necessary.

What's the big deal with 80c? That's not that bad for modern hardware.

I'm running mine in an mATX with an Athlon X4 860k overclocked and I never have major thermal issues, and this is with a large soundcard right below it, and 3 full size hard drives and a DVD drive. Not a lot of empty space in this cage. IIRC the major heat issues were only with the reference style cards that try to jettison all there heat out the back (and fail because the die is just too fucking big to cool that way. 8800-GTX 580 series were the same way). The only case cooling I have is a 90MM rear and a 90MM front fan.

(Actually, come to think of it it runs cooler than this machines clone with a GTX 970)

80c is uncomfortable, but isn't out of spec at all, especially in an ITX case with bad airflow. Start getting worried when they hit 90c instead, thats where most things heavily throttle down and result in massive performance losses.

just encase your GPUs in snow

To the people saying Maxwell works just fine in XP -- have you extensively played very early XP games say from late 2001-2004?

infiniteclouds wrote:

To the people saying Maxwell works just fine in XP -- have you extensively played very early XP games say from late 2001-2004?

My GTX 960 never gave me problems. In 3dmark 2000-2005 it always out scored my GTS 250 by at least double. I did play serious sam quite a bit, and some warcraft III, but my motherboard happened to die shortly after I upgraded the GPU so I haven't been using it lately.

Sometimes the GoG release of certain games worked better, but that was also true of my GTS 250. For example, my original media of Farcry had shader problems on the water above medium detail, but the GoG version of Farcry ran just fine.

infiniteclouds wrote:

To the people saying Maxwell works just fine in XP -- have you extensively played very early XP games say from late 2001-2004?

My GTX 960 never gave me problems. In 3dmark 2000-2005 it always out scored my GTS 250 by at least double. I did play serious sam quite a bit, and some warcraft III, but my motherboard happened to die shortly after I upgraded the GPU so I haven't been using it lately.

Sometimes the GoG release of certain games worked better, but that was also true of my GTS 250. For example, my original media of Farcry had shader problems on the water above medium detail, but the GoG version of Farcry ran just fine.

This comes up every one in a while. I hear people claim that later nvidia GPUs don't work as well in XP, but I have never seen or read anything specific about it. I don't know of any games that play differently on later hardware... after say 2005 they are all the same seems to me.