NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTFar Cry 3
The final new game added to the latest rendition of our benchmark suite is Far Cry 3, Ubisoft’s recently released island-jungle action game. A lot like our other jungle game Crysis, Far Cry 3 can be quite tough on GPUs, especially with MSAA and improved alpha-to-coverage checking thrown into the mix. On the other hand it’s still a bit of a pig on the CPU side, and seemingly inexplicably we’ve found that it doesn’t play well with HyperThreading on our testbed, making this the only game we’ve ever had to disable HT for to maximize our framerates.
For the 7970GE and GTX 680, FC3 at 2560 was already a very close match. Or put another way, with the 7970GE and GTX 680 tied up with each other, Titan is free to clear the both of them by approximately 35% each at 2560. This is enough to launch Titan past the 60fps mark, the first for any single-GPU card.
As for our other resolutions, it’s interesting to note that the gains at both 5760 and 1920 with MSAA are actually greater than at 2560. As we mentioned before Far Cry is somewhat demanding on the CPU side of things, so Titan may not be fully stretching out at 2560. In which case the performance gains due to Titan would be closer to 45-50%.
Moving on to our multi-GPU cards, this is something of a mixed bag. Titan isn’t close to winning, but GTX 690 wins by under 30%, and 7990 by just 17%. This is despite the fact that SLI/CF scaling is as strong as it is. At the same time Far Cry 3 is a good contemporary reminder of just what Titan can excel at: had Titan been out in 2012, it would have been doing roughly this well while NVIDIA would have still been hammering out their SLI profiles for this game. Multi-GPU cards are powerful, but they are forever reliant on waiting for profiles to unlock their capabilities.
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CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
You seem to keep forgetting nearly all other computer parts, since our illustrious communist has usurped the perch, have also not fallen in price, as has traditionally been the case.Computers parts across the board are staying the same and rising in price.
It's called a crappy world money printing inflationary mess.
If you haven't noticed it, you're clueless.
chizow - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Yeah once again you must be living in a parallel universe.PCs, and electronics in general, are all getting cheaper in price and increasing in performance with each iteration. Hell even Apple products have lower price points than they did 3-4 years ago across the board.
Just look at laptops for example. You can get a solid "Ultrabook" laptop for $500-800. Same class of laptop would've cost you $1200-$1500 5 years ago.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - link
A finished product is not a computer part you fool.Nice try liar.
colonelpepper - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
VueAvid
Maya
Autocad
3DS Max
After Effects
Adobe Creative Suite
This card is touching the boundary between gaming & QUADRO cards and yet there are ZERO benchmarks for any of this software yet page after page after page after page dedicated to various games.
What gives?
Perhaps Toms will have a relevant review.
Hrel - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
I was wondering about this as well. Dustin even says it designed as a "cheap compute card".I'd add PowerDirector to the list though.
Hrel - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Ryan*JarredWalton - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Keep in mind the time constraints. Ryan and Anand received the Titan hardware late last week; adding in additional testing for this article is a bit much, considering Ryan already had to write the initial Part 1 plus this Part 2. I'm guessing that performance in professional apps where Quadro is usually the go-to choice aren't going to benefit all that much from Titan relative to GTX 680, though, unless NVIDIA is reversing their stance on Quadro getting special drivers (which doesn't seem to be the case).dbr1 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Exactly!How does this card perform in Adobe Premiere Pro???
atlr - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Seeing performance of a benchmark like http://ppbm5.com/ with Creative Suite v6.03 across the set of Nvidia and AMD cards would be interesting. I have not found runs of this benchmark with a AMD 7970 yet. CUDA rules the Adobe roost although there is some OpenCL support in current products.Ryan Smith - Monday, February 25, 2013 - link
Due to the disparity in GeForce and Quadro drivers, not to mention the difference in support, these are programs where for the most part it wouldn't make much sense to benchmark them on a GeForce Titan. Now if NVIDIA rolls out a GK110 Quadro, then that would be far more useful.If you're in the market for a Quadro, you're probably not in the market for a GeForce. NVIDIA keeps those market segments rather rigorously separated.