In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Inno3D iChill HerculeZ X3 Ultra DHS Edition are noticeably better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 Zotac AMP! Edition.

The GTX 770 has a 104 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 780, but the GTX 780 has 64 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 770. As a result, the GTX 780 exhibits a 53.6 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 770. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 770 has a 104 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 780, but the GTX 780 has 16 more Render Output Units than the GTX 770. As a result, the GTX 780 exhibits a 13.4 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTX 770. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 770 was released less than a year after the GTX 780, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

Both GPUs exhibit very powerful performance, so it probably isn't worth upgrading from one to the other, as both are capable of running even the most demanding games at the highest settings.

The GTX 780 has 1024 MB more video memory than the GTX 770, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GTX 780 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 780 has 67.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 770, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 780 is much better than the GTX 770.

The GeForce GTX 780 Inno3D iChill HerculeZ X3 Ultra DHS Edition has 2304 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 770 Zotac AMP! Edition has 1536. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 780 is 2500 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 770 is 1846. The GTX 780 having 654 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 780 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 770.

The GeForce GTX 780 Inno3D iChill HerculeZ X3 Ultra DHS Edition requires 265 Watts to run but there is no entry for the GeForce GTX 770 Zotac AMP! Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 780 and a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 770. The two GPUs have been recommended a PSU with the same amount of wattage. As such, there is no need to worry about which will more significantly affect your yearly electricity bills.