[Hexus] Palit GeForce GTX 780 JetStream 6GB in SLI

3DVagabond

Lifer
Aug 10, 2009
11,951
204
106
First review I've seen for the new 6gig GTX-780's. Hexus has two so they give us single and SLI results.

Their conclusion:
Our investigation into the Palit GeForce GTX 780 JetStream graphics cards shows that its standout feature, a 6GB buffer, doesn't come into any meaningful play when gaming at a 4K resolution. It can be argued that even a GTX 780 doesn't have enough oomph to take liberal advantage of more memory, so the extra buffer may be better suited to a highly-clocked GTX 780 Ti instead.

Taking advantage of two Palit GTX 780 JetStreams, at a cost of £800 or so, brings higher performance that has genuine use when gaming at such a high resolution. Performance increases of 70 per cent are typical, but do understand that thermal limitations can come into play by reducing the GPU Boost ability of the duo.

Ruminations of 4K-playing ability aside, Palit continues to offer some of the best value of any Nvidia partner. We expect these 6GB-toting cards to arrive with a retail price of £400, matching some of the 3GB-equipped competition out there, so you're effectively getting the framebuffer at a very small premium.

Want to game at 4K and don't want to spend absolutely silly money? Palit's GeForce GTX 780 JetStream 6GB, priced at £400 a pop, are a decent bet.
 

blackened23

Diamond Member
Jul 26, 2011
8,548
2
0
I wish some well known website would dispel the misconceptions about VRAM. More VRAM is not about more performance. It is about more anti aliasing. More modding. Now at a certain point you will need more VRAM, but with 3GB cards you will be fine at 4k. Most people hitting VRAM issues are using too much special anti aliasing such as OGSSAA, BF4's resolution scale (same as OGSSAA), SSAA, or SGSSAA. If you go stupid with SSAA you will not only chop your performance by 50-75%, you will double to quadruple your VRAM use for no good reason. Other than anti aliasing.

Even with 2GB of VRAM, you can play surround 5760x1200 and never have a VRAM problem. Ever. If you have a VRAM issue, it's because you're using overkill AA or too many mods.

But yeah. More VRAM doesn't make your card faster. I'd like to say that eventually people will realize this, but I think AIB vendors want to sell more cards with more VRAM for profit so there's no compelling reason for them to spell out what more VRAM is for. This of course allows them to sell 4GB GTX 770 cards to suckers who think that it will benefit them at 1080p. Yeah, 4GB at 1080..........................waste of money. Unfortunately, there are a lot of suckers out there that think "oh hey more VRAM means more frames!" which obviously is NOT true. You can view a plethora of 2 vs 4 GB GTX 680 reviews, or 3 vs 6 GB 780 reviews and see this. The only thing which will add performance is higher clocks for the core, VRAM on the same card. More VRAM? Same performance. More anti aliasing. More modding. And that's about it. Again, at a certain point more VRAM becomes desirable but you'd have to use an absurdly high surround resolution for that to come into play past 3GB. Perhaps 7680x1440/1600. I'd say 6GB makes sense there.

The sad thing is that the "next gen" consoles are so weak that we are using more VRAM for anti aliasing in PC games than we are for assets. This was not the case with prior generations. But when the next gen can barely push 720 or 900p at 30 fps, then yeah, we get slightly improved PC ports in which we can go nuts with SSAA. And then we'll feel better about hitting a VRAM wall because we're using 4GB-6GB of VRAM solely for more anti aliasing. Good times.
 
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Feb 19, 2009
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PC gamers like to run mods where possible.

And those who spend big bucks on uber setups actually do it to run at uber settings, often overkill for you or I, but its what they want, so they often go for extra vram on their cards.

Its actually quite good to see a very small or here, non existant premium for 3gb of extra vram, its a great deal.
 

3DVagabond

Lifer
Aug 10, 2009
11,951
204
106
A couple of things I found interesting

1, power usage for 1 card vs. 2 cards.
Power.png

280W for a single card vs. 456 for two. An increase of only 176W. Even with the massive custom cooler the cards are throttling badly.

2, temps
Temp.png

Temp has jumped to 88°C. Only 4 degrees less than the "too hot" 290X. This explains the throttling problem

3, noise
Noise.png

Actually louder than the 290X.

It doesn't seem these cards are a particularly effective SLI setup. Since a single card would have no chance of using 6gig of RAM, it seems like this isn't the optimum design for a 6gig platform.
 
Feb 19, 2009
10,457
10
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That's to be expected of most open air cards in CF or SLI, especially when they pump out so much heat in a closed case. The ventilation setup required to keep them cool and quiet is not simple.
 

omeds

Senior member
Dec 14, 2011
646
13
81
Should have had 6GB options at release, I can choke with 3GB at 1440p np.
 

RaulF

Senior member
Jan 18, 2008
844
1
81
Should have had 6GB options at release, I can choke with 3GB at 1440p np.


Come now, you are not making stuff up.

Plenty of members here say that 3gigs is plenty.

P.S. Glad to see someone else join my side.
 

wand3r3r

Diamond Member
May 16, 2008
3,180
0
0
I wish some well known website would dispel the misconceptions about VRAM. More VRAM is not about more performance. It is about more anti aliasing. More modding. Now at a certain point you will need more VRAM, but with 3GB cards you will be fine at 4k. Most people hitting VRAM issues are using too much special anti aliasing such as OGSSAA, BF4's resolution scale (same as OGSSAA), SSAA, or SGSSAA. If you go stupid with SSAA you will not only chop your performance by 50-75%, you will double to quadruple your VRAM use for no good reason. Other than anti aliasing.

Even with 2GB of VRAM, you can play surround 5760x1200 and never have a VRAM problem. Ever. If you have a VRAM issue, it's because you're using overkill AA or too many mods.

But yeah. More VRAM doesn't make your card faster. I'd like to say that eventually people will realize this, but I think AIB vendors want to sell more cards with more VRAM for profit so there's no compelling reason for them to spell out what more VRAM is for. This of course allows them to sell 4GB GTX 770 cards to suckers who think that it will benefit them at 1080p. Yeah, 4GB at 1080..........................waste of money. Unfortunately, there are a lot of suckers out there that think "oh hey more VRAM means more frames!" which obviously is NOT true. You can view a plethora of 2 vs 4 GB GTX 680 reviews, or 3 vs 6 GB 780 reviews and see this. The only thing which will add performance is higher clocks for the core, VRAM on the same card. More VRAM? Same performance. More anti aliasing. More modding. And that's about it. Again, at a certain point more VRAM becomes desirable but you'd have to use an absurdly high surround resolution for that to come into play past 3GB. Perhaps 7680x1440/1600. I'd say 6GB makes sense there.

The sad thing is that the "next gen" consoles are so weak that we are using more VRAM for anti aliasing in PC games than we are for assets. This was not the case with prior generations. But when the next gen can barely push 720 or 900p at 30 fps, then yeah, we get slightly improved PC ports in which we can go nuts with SSAA. And then we'll feel better about hitting a VRAM wall because we're using 4GB-6GB of VRAM solely for more anti aliasing. Good times.

Turning up AA is not a good reason to have more ram? Arguing against maxing settings is odd in an enthusiast forum why not go all the way and set it to low and be happy with an iGPU.

Sure you won't get more performance purely with more ram, but your argument is negated if you like AA, more ram will not bog down in certain cases.
 

SirPauly

Diamond Member
Apr 28, 2009
5,187
1
0
I wish some well known website would dispel the misconceptions about VRAM. More VRAM is not about more performance. It is about more anti aliasing. More modding. Now at a certain point you will need more VRAM, but with 3GB cards you will be fine at 4k. Most people hitting VRAM issues are using too much special anti aliasing such as OGSSAA, BF4's resolution scale (same as OGSSAA), SSAA, or SGSSAA. If you go stupid with SSAA you will not only chop your performance by 50-75%, you will double to quadruple your VRAM use for no good reason. Other than anti aliasing.

Anti-aliasing may be very important to some and the reason why there are choices for more sku's with more ram. Considering, the lesser Gk-104 sku's had double the ram choice it would of been nice or more ideal to see the GTX 780ti with this option and also the GTX 780 earlier. Gamers were kinda forced to pay a much steeper premium for more ram with the choice of Titan!
 

SirPauly

Diamond Member
Apr 28, 2009
5,187
1
0
I think 2 gigs is enough over-all for many but nice to see choices for more ram for the enthusiasts that desire higher levels of AA or mods!
 

blackened23

Diamond Member
Jul 26, 2011
8,548
2
0
I'm told 2GB is more than enough for 1440P. :awe:

I dunno, I could say that I used 680 sli for ages at 1600p. How many VRAM issues? Oh yeah. None. But I didn't go silly with OGSSAA. So tell us what your experience with 1600p is please, go for it.

I could also be silly and link reviews from objective websites showing performance benchmarks between 2 and 4GB at 1600p. Guess what the performance difference is. Guess. It's a number between zero and..........zero. You get more mods and more SSAA with more VRAM. MSAA is unaffected, you can use all the MSAA you want. But once you go into stupid zone with SSAA, that's when VRAM use doubles or triples. That's also the same SSAA that chops your framerate by one half or more. Same with mods, if you want to go nuts with mods in Skyrim, you can do that with more VRAM. But saying more than 2GB is *required* at 1600p, nope, wrong. More SSAA, SGSSAA, SGSSAA, modding. That's about it. Performance difference: none. I'm not saying that if you want more VRAM it isn't valid, but you don't need more VRAM unless you're doing a silly resolution such as 7680x1440. 3GB is fine for 4k. I'd say 4-6GB is the area for 7680x1440/1600.

Shall I get you those reviews since you made the smirk in your post?
 
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blackened23

Diamond Member
Jul 26, 2011
8,548
2
0
I think 2 gigs is enough over-all for many but nice to see choices for more ram for the enthusiasts that desire higher levels of AA or mods!

Yes, having more choice is valid. Seeing some suggesting that 3-4 GB is required for 1080p or 1440p is just...................................headscratch worthy.

Having more choice is great if you're doing a super high surround resolution or 4k. Seeing people go out of their way to get 4-6GB for 1080p though? Or 1440p. Some website needs to clear up the VRAM myths. I think way too many purchasers think that they're buying performance with more VRAM, it's actually a common misconception - AIBs certainly don't have an incentive to spell out the benefits, they probably want to sell those 4GB 770 cards to those same people and rip them off. When they really don't need it for their resolution.
 

Face2Face

Diamond Member
Jun 6, 2001
4,100
215
106
I dunno, I could say that I used 680 sli for ages at 1600p. How many VRAM issues? Oh yeah. None. But I didn't go silly with OGSSAA. So tell us what your experience with 1600p is please, go for it.

I could also be silly and link reviews from objective websites showing performance benchmarks between 2 and 4GB at 1600p. Guess what the performance difference is. Guess. It's a number between zero and..........zero. You get more mods and more SSAA with more VRAM. MSAA is unaffected, you can use all the MSAA you want. But once you go into stupid zone with SSAA, that's when VRAM use doubles or triples. That's also the same SSAA that chops your framerate by one half or more. Same with mods, if you want to go nuts with mods in Skyrim, you can do that with more VRAM. But saying more than 2GB is *required* at 1600p, nope, wrong. More SSAA, SGSSAA, SGSSAA, modding. That's about it. Performance difference: none. I'm not saying that if you want more VRAM it isn't valid, but you don't need more VRAM unless you're doing a silly resolution such as 7680x1440. 3GB is fine for 4k. I'd say 4-6GB is the area for 7680x1440/1600.

Shall I get you those reviews since you made the smirk in your post?

I can't speak for any other game other than Metro Last light, which gives you the option in the game settings to apply SSAA. But it seems Metro LL uses very little vram even @ 4XSSAA @ 1440p, which is effectively rendering the game at 5K and still using AAA on top of the SSAA. I recorded a sample of the gameplay, while the performance is horrid the memory usage is extremely low, below 1700MB. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdYbs92hXXw

IMO Metro LL is one the best looking PC games and I think whatever optimizations they did with textures or whatever else to keep vram usage this low is pretty remarkable.
 

blackened23

Diamond Member
Jul 26, 2011
8,548
2
0
I'm not sure how Metro: LL does things but I usually do SSAA via override SGSSAA or downsampling. And in those instances, at 1600p, VRAM use skyrockets. It goes up, but it's even more pronounced in surround resolutions. It's interesting that a few games include SSAA - hitman, metro LL and sleeping dogs, but most of them don't. You have to use override most of the time.

Override SSAA does not kick in unless MSAA is being used in game in tandem with it. Ingame SSAA, not sure if it's a more efficient or different algorithm? Not sure what's going on with Metro: LL there. I guess I can give it a double check this evening.
 

BrightCandle

Diamond Member
Mar 15, 2007
4,762
0
76
...Some website needs to clear up the VRAM myths...

Many of them have done so. There were reviews galore this year testing the impact of VRAM with 4k resolutions and surround and 1440p and 1080p in a variety of games. Its been tested to death on the review sites, I think Anandtech might be the only site that didn't do a review like that this year. But then they seem to have abandoned graphics and motherboards and such and moved into Mobile phone testing now so that doesn't say much about the lack of the anandtech review having anything to do with the myths just how much they have changed their focus.

Then you have gamegpu.ru which publishes the VRAM usage for every game on both AMD and Nvidia, so you can look through and not only see what high end settings require but on both platforms for every major game and release of major game going back several years. its invaluable data and extremely useful and insightful.

The evidence is overwhelming and compelling that the extra VRAM is going to waste. Tomshardware about 1-1.5 years ago did a review of scientific computing applications that ran GPGPU and there what happened was that VRAM mattered a lot. There was a sizeable performance difference if you didn't have enough VRAM on the card to do the calculation. That really is the target of all this VRAM, its for compute with particular types of high memory usage algorithms. Its not for games, they don't use that much normally, most are still hovering around 1.2-1.5GB on v high/ultra settings.

Maybe the guys arguing for people buying cards with more VRAM are undeclared reps from Hynix or one of the other memory manufacturers. Sure feels like there is an agenda that isn't based on gamers needing it but on shifting more units of VRAM, because the evidence against it is compelling.
 

blackened23

Diamond Member
Jul 26, 2011
8,548
2
0
Everything you said is spot on. I want to add on to that , different GPUs allocate VRAM in different ways depending on available VRAM as well - I don't know if you've tried this, BC, but I remember when I switched from 7970CF to 680SLI that there were quite a few games that hovered around 3GB per MSI afterburner on the 7970s. Yet I went to the 680SLI and they used less than 2GB.

What happens is, both the game and driver essentially allocate VRAM dyanmically depending on available VRAM - in other words, if you have more VRAM than is needed, the GPU driver and game are less compelled to clear the old VRAM cache. But if you have a lower VRAM card, that happens more frequently.

I remember this happened specifically in BF3 @ 1600p when I first switched from 7970s to 680s - With 7970CF, I had nearly 2.6GB of VRAM used. Yet with 680 SLI in the same level, it was less than 2GB (around 1.8GB IIRC). And that was strange because there was no IQ difference and the 680 sli was very smooth, while the 7970CF was very choppy and stuttery in the same level despite using more VRAM. So I think simply reporting what MSI AB has in terms of VRAM use isn't always reliable, since that varies between cards and how the GPU driver handles clearing old VRAM cache. I think this has shown on some of gamegpu.ru's tests as well? Different cards using different amounts of VRAM? I'll have to double check.

I've seen other websites and youtubers mention this - both the game and driver allocate VRAM dynamically depending on available VRAM. It is very rare to hit a VRAM wall unless you MAKE your card hit a VRAM wall with over the top SSAA settings. I've done just that in Far Cry 3 @ 7680x1600 with 8X MSAA. But in normal use? I've never hit a VRAM wall.

That isn't to say that more VRAM isn't a valid choice. It can be in specific situations. 7680x1600? By all means get the most VRAM you can get. but when I see people pining for 3/4/6 GB at 1080p, it really is mind boggling.
 
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Elfear

Diamond Member
May 30, 2004
7,146
768
126
Even with 2GB of VRAM, you can play surround 5760x1200 and never have a VRAM problem. Ever. If you have a VRAM issue, it's because you're using overkill AA or too many mods.

Is there such a thing? :D

Seriously though, it sucks to have a card powerful enough to render a game but with too little vram to do so smoothly. Mods can make some games look gorgeous, why limit myself by getting a card without enough vram?

For 95% of games I think 2GB is fine up to 1600p (and beyond for lot of them). It's those few games that can take advantage of the extra vram you have to worry about. If you don't mod your games or use lots of AA, you don't have to sweat it.

Turning up AA is not a good reason to have more ram? Arguing against maxing settings is odd in an enthusiast forum why not go all the way and set it to low and be happy with an iGPU.

Sure you won't get more performance purely with more ram, but your argument is negated if you like AA, more ram will not bog down in certain cases.

+1

2GB is probably overkill for most games if you run everything at the lowest settings. :sneaky: