Faster than Titan. That's Asus' claim for their latest bespoke graphics card, and by pairing up a couple of GK 104 GPUs, much like the GTX 690 before it, those claims have a certain validity.
The Asus Republic of Gamers Mars 760 graphics card is another dual-GPU monster, sticking a pair of the GTX 760's own graphics processors onto a single slice of printed circuit board. That means it's rocking 1,152 CUDA cores in each of its chips, for a total of 2,304 across the pair. That's the same amount of cores as the vanilla GTX 780 and only a shade behind the GTX Titan.
The Asus Mars 760 has also got a pair of 2GB frame buffers for a total of 4GB GDDR5 and in true RoG style it's got a fat 12-phase power design to allow both chips to top the 1GHz mark in terms of raw clockspeed. It's also the first time a GTX 760 card is able to be used in quad-SLI configurations - as shown above.
According to my sources at Asus it performs quicker than the Titan and generally on par with the GTX 780 Ti. The interesting thing to note is that even when the average frame rates are hitting parity the Mars 760 is supposedly able to offer higher minimum frame rates for a smoother gaming experience. I've only just received my card in the office so I've yet to put those claims to the test, but I'll be back to tell you how it performs soon enough.
Price-wise, I'm told we're looking roughtly £520. That's a lot of cash considering the vanilla GTX 760 is available for just £180 at the moment and the GTX 780 Ti is about £550.
Personally speaking, even if it does offer higher frame rates than the single-GPU cards it's tough to recommend a dual-GPU card for the same price. Straight performance isn't everything, which is why I always preferred the GTX 780 and GTX Titan over either the GTX 690 or the HD 7990 - both of which offered higher frame rates. A little while down the line it may become tricky getting the dual-GPU setups to play nicely with the latest games, especially around their launch.
Despite my general distrust of multi-GPU setups though I am running a pair of GTX 680s in my office machine at the moment and it sure is making playing and recording Battlefield 4 a lovely experience.
