NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 vs NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Comparison

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 and the NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell sit at opposite ends of a twelve-year span of GPU development, and the database makes the gap easy to quantify. The GTX 780 is a Kepler-era gaming card built on TSMC's 28 nm process with the GK110 chip, while the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell is an active workstation-class part built on the GB202 chip at 5 nm. Comparing them is less about choosing between two current products and more about understanding what a decade of architectural iteration buys: a roughly thirtyfold increase in raw FP32 throughput, a vastly larger and faster memory subsystem, and a feature set the older card simply lacks. The recorded data below walks through each of those dimensions.

The Verdict

Neither card competes for the same buyer, and the data reflects that. The GTX 780 is an end-of-life product, released in 2013 as part of the GeForce 700 generation, carrying a launch MSRP of 649 USD. Its benchmark profile places it at the 64th percentile against all GPUs in the database, with an average benchmark score of 19164, nearly identical to the NVIDIA TITAN Xp at 19177 and within a fraction of a percent of the NVIDIA Tesla K20m at 19089, the mobile RTX 4050 at 19049, and the AMD Radeon RX 6600 at 19036. In other words, the GTX 780's aggregate performance today resembles a cluster of cards spanning professional compute parts and mid-range gaming designs, which tells you its legacy performance tier rather than its modern relevance.

The RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell is an active professional card, released in 2025 into the Blackwell PRO W generation, with a launch MSRP of 8,565 USD. Its single recorded benchmark, 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 at 16408, places it at the 59th percentile against all GPUs, statistically dead even with the AMD Radeon PRO W7500 at 16415 and within a fraction of a percent of the Radeon RX 5700 XT, the Radeon Pro 5600M, and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 D V2 at 16504. That percentile spread is worth interpreting carefully: the percentile figure counts all GPUs including mobile and multi-GPU results, so a workstation flagship sitting at the 59th percentile on one test still posts 126.0 TFLOPS of FP32 compute, which is the real story of this comparison.

The verdict from the data is straightforward. For any workload that depends on ray tracing, tensor operations, large memory capacity, or modern API features, the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell is the only viable option of the two, since the GTX 780 has no RT cores, no tensor cores, and reports DirectX 12 at feature level 11_0 rather than 12 Ultimate. For legacy compatibility, the GTX 780 retains Vulkan 1.2.175 support and OpenGL 4.6, matching the newer card on OpenGL and falling one minor-generation revision behind on Vulkan. Buyers needing a card purely as a historical or low-demand display adapter would find the GTX 780 functional; anyone doing serious work should treat the comparison as a measure of generational progress, not a purchase decision.

FAQ

Q: How large is the raw compute gap between the two cards?

A: The GTX 780 delivers 4.156 TFLOPS of FP32 compute; the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell delivers 126.0 TFLOPS. That is roughly thirty times the throughput, and the newer card matches that figure in FP16 at a 1:1 ratio, whereas the GTX 780 records no FP16 figure at all.

Q: How do their memory subsystems compare?

A: The GTX 780 pairs 3 GB of GDDR5 on a 384-bit bus with 288.4 GB/s of bandwidth, running its memory at 1502 MHz for 6 Gbps effective. The RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell pairs 96 GB of GDDR7 on a 512-bit bus with 1.79 TB/s of bandwidth, running memory at 1750 MHz for 28 Gbps effective. The capacity difference alone, 3 GB versus 96 GB, changes what classes of workload are even possible.

Q: Do the cards support ray tracing or AI acceleration?

A: The RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell includes 188 RT cores and 752 tensor cores. The GTX 780 predates both feature sets and records neither.

Q: What are the power requirements?

A: The GTX 780 has a 250 W TDP, draws power through one 6-pin and one 8-pin connector, and carries a 600 W suggested PSU rating. The RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell has a 600 W TDP, uses a single 16-pin connector, and carries a 1000 W suggested PSU rating. Both are dual-slot cards.

Q: Which card is still in production?

A: The GTX 780 is flagged as end-of-life, having been succeeded by the GeForce 900 generation. The RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell is flagged as active, with no successor listed; its predecessor line is Workstation Ada.

Q: How do their benchmark results compare directly?

A: There is no shared benchmark between them in the database. The GTX 780's results come from Geekbench Metal, OpenCL, and Vulkan tests, while the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell's single result comes from 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12, so a direct score-to-score comparison is not valid.

Architecture Differences

The two cards bookend a remarkable process-node transition. The GTX 780's GK110 chip was fabricated at TSMC on 28 nm, packing 7,080 million transistors into a 561 mm² die for a density of 12.6M transistors per square millimetre. The RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell's GB202 chip, also from TSMC, is fabricated on 5 nm and packs 92,200 million transistors into a 750 mm² die, yielding 122.9M transistors per square millimetre. The die is only about a third larger, yet it carries roughly thirteen times the transistor count, and the near-tenfold density improvement is what makes that possible.

The functional units scale accordingly. The GTX 780 fields 2304 shading units, 192 TMUs, and 48 ROPs; the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell fields 24064 shading units, 752 TMUs, and 192 ROPs. That is roughly ten times the shading resources, roughly four times the texture units, and exactly four times the render outputs. The newer card then adds hardware the Kepler design has no equivalent of at all: 188 RT cores for ray tracing and 752 tensor cores for matrix workloads.

Clock behavior differs as much as unit counts. The GTX 780 runs a base clock of 863 MHz with a boost of 902 MHz, a narrow range typical of its era. The RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell runs a base clock of 1590 MHz with a boost of 2617 MHz, meaning its boost clock alone is nearly triple the older card's base. Feature-level support diverges too: the GTX 780 reports DirectX 12 at feature level 11_0 and Vulkan 1.2.175, while the Blackwell card reports DirectX 12 Ultimate at feature level 12_2 and Vulkan 1.4. Both report OpenGL 4.6, one of the few lines where the two agree.

Specification Differences

Every specification that differs between the two cards is listed here; the few shared traits are worth noting first. Both are NVIDIA products, both use dual-slot cooling, both support OpenGL 4.6, and both use x16 PCIe interfaces, though the GTX 780 uses PCIe 3.0 while the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell uses PCIe 5.0.

The memory subsystem diverges sharply: 3 GB GDDR5 versus 96 GB GDDR7, a 384-bit bus versus a 512-bit bus, and 288.4 GB/s versus 1.79 TB/s of bandwidth. Theoretical output rates follow the same pattern, with pixel fill rate going from 43.30 GPixel/s to 502.5 GPixel/s and texture fill rate from 173.2 GTexel/s to 1,968.0 GTexel/s.

Physical dimensions differ modestly: 267 mm long, 111 mm tall, and 38 mm wide for the GTX 780 versus 304 mm long, 137 mm tall, and 40 mm wide for the Blackwell card. Display output support marks the era gap clearly, with the GTX 780 offering two DVI ports, HDMI 1.4a, and DisplayPort 1.2 against the newer card's four DisplayPort 2.1b outputs. Power delivery also differs: 250 W TDP with one 6-pin and one 8-pin connector and a 600 W suggested PSU for the Kepler card, versus 600 W TDP with a single 16-pin connector and a 1000 W suggested PSU for the Blackwell part.

Head-to-Head Benchmarks

The database records no overlapping benchmark between the two cards, so the head-to-head must be assembled from each card's own results and rival context. This absence is itself informative: the GTX 780's recorded tests, Geekbench Metal at 10114, OpenCL at 22863, and Vulkan at 24514, reflect compute-API workloads, while the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell's single recorded result, 16408 in 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12, is a modern DirectX 12 rendering test the older card cannot meaningfully participate in.

Contextualizing each within its rival cluster is the honest comparison available. The GTX 780's average score of 19164 sits 0.1 percent below the TITAN Xp's 19177, 0.4 percent above the Tesla K20m's 19089, 0.6 percent above the RTX 4050 Mobile's 19049, and 0.7 percent above the RX 6600's 19036. It is effectively indistinguishable from that group in aggregate terms. The RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell's 16408 sits level with the Radeon PRO W7500 at 16415, marginally ahead of the RX 5700 XT at 16361 and the Radeon Pro 5600M at 16351, and slightly behind the RTX 5090 D V2 at 16504.

The specification deltas then fill in what the non-overlapping scores cannot. With 126.0 TFLOPS against 4.156 TFLOPS of FP32, roughly ten times the shading units, 1.79 TB/s against 288.4 GB/s of bandwidth, and dedicated RT and tensor hardware the older card lacks, the raw capability gap is unambiguous. The GTX 780's 64th percentile versus the Blackwell card's 59th percentile is an artifact of different test pools, not evidence of parity. Read the specs, and the generation gap speaks for itself.