Event Coverage

HWM+HardwareZone.com Tech Awards 2014: Editor's Choice - Part 2

Best Graphics Chip

Best Graphics Chip 

In the latest quarter of 2013, AMD unveiled its new R9 and R7 series graphics cards; however, only the top-end R9 290 family features the new and improved Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. The top-end card from AMD was the R9 290X. The rest of the GPUs, from the R9 280 series and lower, were essentially rebranded graphics cores from the Southern Island GPUs (Radeon HD 7900 series). There was an exception as the R7 260 that features a new ASIC, so that it supports the new AMD TrueAudio technology. The riposte from NVIDIA came in the form of its GeForce GTX 780 Ti GPU that features a fully-unlocked GK110 Kepler chip. It features 2880 CUDA cores for single precision processing; in comparison, the GTX 780 has 2304 CUDA cores, while GTX Titan has 2688 such cores.

For the purpose of our Best Graphics Chip title, we pitted the AMD Radeon R9 290X and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti, both of which represent the very best single GPU offering from both camps.

 

Nominees: 

 

  • AMD Radeon R9 290X
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 TI

 

And the Winner Is...

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti is the clear winner as it consistently outperformed the AMD chip. Although their scores were rather close on the 3DMark (2013) tests, the NVIDIA chip pulled ahead in our real world gaming benchmarks. In addition, the GeForce GTX 780 Ti also shone during our overclocking exercise. Another advantage of the NVIDIA chip was that it performed cooler at 79 degrees Celsius under load, in comparison to the high operating temperature of 87 degrees Celsius of the AMD Radeon R9 290X. The NVIDIA counterpart is also the quieter of both cards, which again plays well to the overall proposition.

Scoring Breakdown
Criteria/Model AMD Radeon R9 290X NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti
Performance 8.0 9.0
Features 8.5 9.0
Value 8.0 7.5
Overall 8.0
8.5

For more details on how we selected our winners, check out the full reviews and articles listed at the References section at the end.

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