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Today we are taking the brand new GeForce GTX 750 Ti and putting it head to head with the recently released Radeon R7 265. As luck would have it both GPU’s are set to occupy the affordable $150 price bracket, so which deserves your money? Read on to find out...
Last week AMD released the Radeon R7 265, a new $150 Volcanic Islands (Rx 200) series part that sits between the R7 260X and R7 270 in terms of price and performance. This new GPU was given the codename ‘Pitcairn Pro’ and you might recall that name from a few years ago. In fact this is the very same codename given to the Radeon HD 7850 back in 2012 and it’s not the only thing these GPU’s have in common.
 The Radeon R7 265 is a re-badged 7850 that has been overclocked for slightly better performance. Although the clock speeds suggest that the R7 265 will be 8% faster, the $150 MSRP means that the debut price is 40% cheaper than that of the 7850 some 2 years ago. Still, in an era of Radeon R9 290X and GeForce GTX 780 Ti’s a heavily discounted Radeon HD 7850 isn’t that exciting. After all, other than some factory overclocking nothing else is new, this is still a GCN 1.0 part so new features such as TrueAudio aren’t supported. Today marks the arrival of the latest GeForce 700 series GPU and like the Radeon R7 265 it’s another affordable solution. Codenamed ‘GM107’ this latest GPU will be better known as the GeForce GTX 750 Ti. Coincidently the GTX 750 Ti has also been slapped with a $150 MSRP, placing it in direct competition with the R7 265. However whereas the R7 265 is simply a re-badged product, the GeForce GTX 750 Ti is something more. Previously we have seen the GeForce GTX 770 which was a re-badged GTX 680. Then along came the GTX Titan, GTX 780 and GTX 780 Ti which were all ‘GK110’ parts (essentially GK104 on steroids). The GM107 on the other hand is something entirely new altogether. The GM107 marks the introduction of the Nvidia Maxwell architecture, designed to make the 28nm design process as efficient as possible, and it achieves this by making it slightly more complex. The Kepler design saw a single SM contain 192 cores which Nvidia says was complex for a single piece of control logic. With Maxwell they have divided the SM into four blocks, each with its own piece of control logic. The control logic now manages 32 cores instead of 192, making its task much simpler. This helps to increase utilization of our cores allowing Maxwell to do more with less. As a result, Nvidia claims that they actually increased the amount of peak performance per core by 35% when compared to the cores in chips built with the previous generation Kepler architecture. Since they are using less overall cores to get more performance, less power is ultimately used, increasing the performance/watt for the Maxwell architecture. A number of additional optimizations were made inside the chip to increase power efficiency. We will look at this in more detail shortly but first let’s take a look at Gainward and Gigabyte’s GeForce GTX 750 Ti GS cards. |
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