NVIDIA 780i: Evolution Plus Triple SLI

General System Performance

The PCMark05 benchmark, developed by Futuremark, is useful for determining overall system performance for the typical home computing user. This tool provides both system and component level benchmarking results utilizing subsets of real world applications or programs. The test is useful for providing comparative results across a broad array of GPU, CPU, hard disk, and memory configurations along with multithreading results. In this sense, we consider the PCMark benchmark to be both synthetic and real world in nature while providing consistency in our benchmark results.

As expected, the performance difference between 780i and 680i is less than 1%, which is well within the confidence levels of this benchmark. Essentially both chipsets perform the same.

General Graphics Performance

The 3DMark series of benchmarks from Futuremark are among the most widely used tools for benchmark reporting and comparisons. Although the benchmarks are very useful for providing apple to apple comparisons across a broad array of GPU and CPU configurations they are not a substitute for actual application and gaming benchmarks. In this sense, we consider the 3DMark benchmarks to be purely synthetic in nature but still valuable for providing consistent measurements of performance.

The later 3DMark tests, such as 3DMark05, are almost entirely influenced by the GPU under test, though CPU performance plays a larger role in 3DMark06. Results should be extremely close in this instance since we use the same graphics card for testing on both systems. 3DMark01 is still widely used because it is a useful overall system performance test. System, CPU, and memory configurations affect results far more than in later 3DMark benchmarks.

3DMark06 results are all but identical, while 3Dmark01 shows performance results within about half a percent. Performance in these general graphics benchmarks is therefore the same.

Rendering Performance

The CINEBENCH 9.5 benchmark heavily stresses the CPU subsystem while performing graphics modeling and rendering. We utilize the standard benchmark demos in each program along with the default settings. CINEBENCH 9.5 features two different benchmarks with one test utilizing a single core and the second test showcasing the power of multiple cores in rendering the benchmark image. We use the multi-core benchmark to compare the 780i and 680i.

Results in the SMP rendering tests are the same for the 680i and 780i.

Tests with these four general performance benchmarks confirm that the performance of the 780i and 680i is essentially the same when using equivalent systems. This is what we expected given the fact that NVIDIA clearly states there is no change in the micro-architecture of the 780i compared to the 680i.

Recent graphics testing has already established that current video cards do not even come close to saturating the current PCIe 1.1 bus. Future video cards and applications will be more demanding, but it will likely be some time before we see a measurable performance advantage with PCIe 2.0.