If you’ve been told that PC gaming is all about (insert booming voice here) maximum performance, you’ve been told wrong. Most people, even hard core PC gamers, have budgets. So buying the latest, greatest and absolutely fastest piece of hardware sounds great, until you digest the price.

Last week, we tested Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 780. It’s certainly true that the GTX 780 is one fast card. It’s also true that it costs $649 or more. That’s a pretty serious amount of cash. Ideally, you want to maximize your performance per dollar. Enter the GTX 770.

The GTX 770 reference card looks almost identical to the GTX 780, but the GTX 770 uses a GK104 GPU.

I’m not going to talk much about the GTX 770 architecture, because the 770 is really a beefier GTX 680. That is, it’s a GK104 chip, just like the GTX 680, with the same number of shader cores. But it also boasts two or four gigabytes of 7 gigabit per second GDDR5 – the fastest graphics memory you can get today.

Nvidia is targeting a $399 price point for the 770. That’s only a little more than the current 670, cheaper than the existing 680s and much less than the new GTX 780. It’s also about on par with average price for Radeon HD 7970 GHz Editon cards, and about $75 more than the average Radeon HD 7950. However, the higher speed memory and higher clock speeds do come at a cost. Let’s first parse the specs, comparing the GTX 670, 680 and 770.

Source: www.tested.com