Performance-Wise which is better 2 GTX-770s or 1 GTX Titan Black

[Hamdan]

Thanks for opening this thread

I wanted to know which would give me better performance 2 GTX-770s hooked up through SLI or 1 GTX Titan Black?

The price of the GPU setups is roughly the same since I'll have to get a 1200w psu for the 2 GTX-770s. Since I have no technical knowledge of how SLI works or it's performance benefits I refer to you the technical gods of the internt So thoughts, opinions, suggestions about this, the nvidia shield, direct x 12, future nvidia releases, build problems or anything else is greatly appreciated

Here's the details on the current rig that i'm planning to upgrade:
CASE: Antec 1100 Ultimate Gaming Tower Case
MOBO: Asus Z87 Deluxe
CPU: Intel i7 4770k @ 3.5GHz
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 7900
FAN: Corsair Water Cooler H80
PSU: Corsair GS 800 800W

Thanks for reading this boring post.

 

[Morgoth780]

Um.

Well why don't you just crossfire your current GPU? That would give you pretty good performance. And you don't need anywhere near a 1200w power supply for two 770s, 750w or so would be fine.

Anyway as for your question: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1064?vs=1186

If you are playing at a resolution below 4k the 770s are better.

 

[Deders]

2 770's would potentially have more GPU grunt but may be limited for memory if you only get 2GB cards, so 4GB on each card would be a must.

There will be situations where a game is incompatible with SLI or it might take a month to get a SLI profile from Nvidia and you will have to use a single card until then. This happened to me on a few releases.

Also you have to bear in mind that not all games will be able to make full use of SLI, so might get 150% performance of a single card instead of 190%.

If you are just gaming there is no point getting a Titan black at all, the 780TI is the same card with a few professional features disabled. Personally I'd rather have this than 2 770's as it would provide enough performance with lower power draw and heat, as well as more constant performance.

If you do want to go SLI then might want to wait a month or so for the 880's to be released, they will be faster than the 770's (which will go down in price) and probably more futureproof.

You won't need 1200W for SLI, your 800 should be fine. The cards only draw about 200W each.

 

[BrightCandle]

The two 770's will almost always be faster. The only cases where that wont be the case are when you don't have enough VRAM or when SLI isn't working well or at all.

The 780 ti is only about 15-40% faster than a 770 on its own depending on the game. But 770 SLI is almost always at least 50% quicker, regularly 90% faster.

 

[RussianSensation]

Don't bother with either setup:

1) 770 2GB SLI for 2-3 years is going to result in a severe VRAM bottleneck for future games.

2) 770 4GB SLI is severely overpriced and slower than equivalently priced R9 290s.

3) Titan Black makes no sense since it is not any faster than 780Ti and in fact R9 290/290X/780 x2 will crush it for $800-1000.

The 2 options you described are the worst possible options out of everything you can currently buy in those price brackets. Since GTX870/880 is to launch in the next 1-2 months, if you are going to drop $800+ on GPUs, you should definitely wait.

 

[3DVagabond]

What resolution and how old is that PSU?

 

[kasakka]

I've been using a 750W PSU with 2 GTX 770s for a while now so if the PSU is in good shape you should be fine.

It remains to be seen if 2GB is too little VRAM for 2xGTX770. So far the only thing that has put my setup to its knees is GTA IV with the Icehancer mod at 2560x1440. Even Skyrim with 2K textures ran fine with just one GTX770. Then again I'm not a heavy antialiasing user and that will increase VRAM requirements a lot.

That said at this point I'd wait for the 8xx series or at least get your SLI setup used so you save a lot of money.

 

[Grooveriding]

The Titan Black with some overclocking. Overclocked 780ti is as fast as 680 SLI, you can see this here, notice the aftermarket 780ti is about 10% faster than a 690, which is 10% slower than 680 SLI. A 780ti is using the same chip as TB with half the memory, so barring VRAM issues, the performance characteristics in gaming are identical.

http://www.computerbase.de/2013-11/geforce-gtx-780-ti-gigabyte-inno3d-test/2/

So accounting for the performance loss from SLI scaling with two cards, remember that because one card is 100%, adding a second does not give you 200% performance as you lose a lot in the scaling problems with multi-GPU setups - you would find a 770SLI setup about 10% faster than an overclocked Titan Black. AMD cards tend to show much closer to 200% scaling in dual setups than nvidia cards, but neither achieve that sort of performance gain consistently when accounting for many games.

I would say the loss of such a small amount of performance in the single card is negligible and you wouldn't notice it outside of benchmarking to see it, but, the gain of using a single card would be huge with the advantage of much smoother frame rates than you get out of using two cards. An example would be that I play Battlefield 4 with just one card active because of how choppy SLI is in that game.

 

[janii]

Don't bother with either setup:

1) 770 2GB SLI for 2-3 years is going to result in a severe VRAM bottleneck for future games.

2) 770 4GB SLI is severely overpriced and slower than equivalently priced R9 290s.

3) Titan Black makes no sense since it is not any faster than 780Ti and in fact R9 290/290X/780 x2 will crush it for $800-1000.

The 2 options you described are the worst possible options out of everything you can currently buy in those price brackets. Since GTX870/880 is to launch in the next 1-2 months, if you are going to drop $800+ on GPUs, you should definitely wait.

My gtx 580 with 1.5gb still working perfectly fine.
Everything on max except 1-2 tier lowered AA in newest games
50-60fps @1080p

Hell even that broken pile of watchdogs ran good on ultra (well, 40-50/60fps but incredible micro stuttering)

Well on the other hand I also clocked my i5 2500k to 4.5ghz and gpu to 915 i believe

VRAM was never an issue for me at least, but I agree that especially for the next years and higher resolution more VRAm would be healthy


@OP whatever you do, wait for maxwell first. There should be price cuts.

 

[Hamdan]

I love all you guys for giving me such valuable information.
Thank you honestly and truly and from the bottom of my heart.

It's best at this point to wait for maxwell as in all likelihood there will be some significant price drops or I may even invest in some maxwell chips depending on their specifications and benchmarks.

As to why I don't upgrade my current rig and crossfire my current setup it's simply because of the nvidia shield portable. Prior to the announcement of the shield tablet, I was hoping it would an announcement of a hardware upgrade for the shield portable that would make it lighter. The R9 290s are legitimately good well priced cards and with wireless hdmi taking off there will be many good DIY alternatives for the nvidia shield in 2 years or so... but at the moment, and correct if I'm mistaken, the shield is probably the best way to stream games from a pc.

 

[Subyman]

Don't bother with either setup:

1) 770 2GB SLI for 2-3 years is going to result in a severe VRAM bottleneck for future games.

The 770 is arguably already over 2 years old right now (680 came out in March 2012.) Hard to spend nearly $350 each on such old tech. Definitely wait or buy something used.

 

[alcoholbob]

I'd rather have a single Titan Black or 780Ti than 770 SLI. SLI rarely works for the genres I mostly play (strategy games and RPGs) and even if support is patched it it usually comes out weeks to months later when I've already beaten the game. My experience is if you like playing games of the RPG/RTS genre in the first week you are better off with a fast single card.

 

[tollingalong]

A 290 is a better bang for the buck IMO.
If you want pure performance just get a 780 Ti and OC out the wazoo.

If you have unlimited $$$, from what others have said to me a 290x will be best. It can be OCed to absurd levels but get ready to get an 850Watt PSU. Liquid cooling 290x won't hurt.

 

[Hamdan]

Thank you guys I truly appreciate your feedback I'm definitely waiting for maxwell at that point in time I'll judge based on the price cuts they offer by the sounds of things SLI is a cost efficient gamble and as you suggest i'd rather just have a single powerful card like the 780 Ti or the Titan Black