NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTHitman: Absolution
The third game in our revised lineup is Hitman: Absolution. The latest game in Square Enix’s stealth-action series, Hitman: Absolution is a DirectX 11 based title that though a bit heavy on the CPU, can give most GPUs a run for their money. Furthermore it has a built-in benchmark, which gives it a level of standardization that fewer and fewer benchmarks possess.
Based on our results I suspect Hitman is CPU limited beyond 85fps or so, which is depressing our results on these extremely powerful cards. Titan is by far the fastest of the single-GPU cards, but at 2560 it only beats the GTX 680 by 34%, and the 7970GE by 18%. If we jump up to 5760 we can see that Titan pulls ahead by more, now 48% and 33% respectively, and this is probably the most pure GPU result we’re going to get out of Hitman.
Note that the dual-GPU cards still do better than Titan here, but they are running right into the wall presented by the CPU bottleneck. Their 17% leads are nothing to scoff at, but it may not be all they’re capable of.
Meanwhile thanks to its built-in benchmark, Hitman is one of the most consistent games in our lineup, making it a good candidate for including the minimum framerate, which we have below.
The minimum framerates on Hitman show Titan in an even better light. Though it still loses to the dual-GPU configurations, it’s now 40% ahead of the GTX 680 and 25% ahead of the 7970GE respectively. And amusingly enough, at 2560 Titan is just fast enough to hit 60fps minimum.
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UzairH - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Ah ok, thanks for the explanation Ryan. Fair enough if the game is CPU bound, and your policy sounds fair as well. Please note however that at high resolutions enabling SSAO kills the performance, and enabling Transparency Anti-aliasing on top of that even more so, so even without mods Skyrim can still be pretty brutal on cards like the 670 and HD 7970.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
LOL ignore the idiocy and buy the great nVidia card, you'll NEVER have to hear another years long screed from amd fanboys about 3G of ram being future-proof -ESPECIALLY WITH SKYRIM AND ADDONS!!!!As they screamed endlessly....
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
It's a bunch of HOOEY no matter how reasonable "the policy" excuse sounds...http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2013/02/21/nvidia...
There's the Skyrim results, with TITAN 40+% ahead.
trajan2448 - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link
AMDs fps numbers are overstated. They figured out a trick to make runt frames, or frames which are not actually rendered to trigger the fps monitor as a real fully rendered frame. This is real problem for AMD much worse than the latency problem. Crossfire is a disaster which is why numerous reviewers including Tech Report have written that Crossfire produces higher fps but feels less smooth than Nvidia.Check this article out. http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA...
Ankarah - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
From a regular consumer's point of view, the hype it being the fastest 'single' graphics card doesn't really appeal that much - it doesn't make a difference to me how these video cards work in what configurations underneath its big case, as long as it does its job.So I really can't understand why any regular consumer would intentionally choose this over the 690GTX, which seems to be faster overall for the same price, unless you belong to perhaps 0.5% of their market share where you absolutely require FP64 executions for your work but don't really need the full power of Tesla.
And let's face it, if you are willing to shell out a grand for your graphics card for your PC, you aren't worried about the difference their TDP will make on your electric bills.
So I think it's just a marketing circus specifically engineered to draw in a lucky few, to whom money or price/performance ratio holds no value at all - there's nothing to see here for regular Joes like you and me.
Let's move along.
sherlockwing - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
This card is for people willing to spend at least $2K on their Graphic cards and don't want to deal with Quad GPU scaling while also having room for a Third. If you don't have that much cash you are not in its target audience.Ankarah - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
That makes sense,so this card, however we slice it, is only for about perhaps 1% of the consumer base if even that.
andrewaggb - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
pretty much. And bragging rights.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
not for the crybabies we have here.Yet go to another thread and the screaming about the 7990 and the endless dual top end videocard setups with thousand dollar INTEL cpu's will be endless.
It all depends on whose diapers the pooing crybabies are soiling at the moment.
cmdrdredd - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Plus people who want to break world records in benchmarking.