NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTSleeping Dogs
Another Square Enix game, Sleeping Dogs is one of the few open world games to be released with any kind of benchmark, giving us a unique opportunity to benchmark an open world game. Like most console ports, Sleeping Dogs’ base assets are not extremely demanding, but it makes up for it with its interesting anti-aliasing implementation, a mix of FXAA and SSAA that at its highest settings does an impeccable job of removing jaggies. However by effectively rendering the game world multiple times over, it can also require a very powerful video card to drive these high AA modes.
Sleeping Dogs is another game that AMD cards have done rather well at, leaving the GTX 680 quite a way behind. The sheer increase in functional units for Titan means it has no problem vaulting back to the top of the list of single GPU cards, but it also means it’s crossing a sizable gap.
In the end, at 2560 at the High (second-highest) AA settings, Titan is just shy of 50% faster than the GTX 680, but a weaker 17% ahead of the 7970GE. As we drop in resolution/AA, so does Titan’s lead, as the game shifts to being CPU limited.
Notably, no single card is really good enough here for 2560 with Extreme AA, with even Titan only hitting 35fps. This is one of the only games where even with a single monitor there’s real potential for a second Titan card in SLI.
Meanwhile the gap between Titan and our dual-GPU cards is roughly as expected. The GTX 690 takes a smaller lead at 18%, while the 7990 is some 42% ahead.
Due to its built-in benchmark, Sleeping Dogs is also another title that is a good candidate for repeatable and consistent minimum framerate testing.
While on average Titan is faster than the 7970GE, the minimum framerates put Titan in a rough spot. At 2560 with high AA Titan is effectively tied with the 7970GE, and with extreme AA it actually falls behind. It’s not readily apparent why this is, whether it’s some kind of general SSAA bottleneck or if there’s something else going on. But it’s a reminder that at its very worst, Titan can only match the 7970GE.
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vps - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
For compute benchmark you might want to take a look at FAHBenchFAHBench is the official Folding@Home GPU benchmark. It measures the compute performance of GPUs for Folding@Home.
http://proteneer.com/blog/?page_id=1671
Some reference scores are here:
http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2...
Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
FAHBench is primarily an OpenCL benchmark (there's a CUDA path, but it's effectively on its way out). It's on our list, and is one of the things we couldn't run due to the fact that OpenCL is not currently working on Titan.Hrel - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
PowerDirector still uses CUDAatlr - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Not sure if this helps. I found CLBenchmark results of a Titan versus a 7970 here.http://clbenchmark.com/compare.jsp?config_0=144702...
atlr - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Ville Timonen posted results running his own code on a Tesla K20 versus the usual suspects. Might be helpful to folks considering options for GPGPU computation.http://wili.cc/blog/gpgpu-faceoff.html
chizow - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
That's the first thing that comes to mind now when I think of Nvidia, which is a shame because that name used to be synonymous with Awesome. That's gone and replaced with a disdain for ridiculous levels of usury with their last two high-end product launches. I'm not going to be disingenuous and claim I'm going AMD, because the fact of the matter is, Nvidia products are still in a class of it's own for my usage needs, but I will certainly not be spending as much on Nvidia parts as I used to.Kepler has basically set back Nvidia's product stack back by half a generation, but my price:performance metrics will stay the same. Nvidia has their ultra-premium "Xtreme Edition" GPU this round, but that only came about as a result of AMD's ridiculous pricing and overall lackluster performance of the 7970 for a "flagship" card. Either way, I think it will be difficult for Nvidia to sustain this price point, as expectations just got higher at that $1K range.
@Ryan: I'm disappointed you didn't write a harsher commentary on the fact Nvidia is now charging 2x for the same class of GPU, pricing that has stayed true since 2006. Even the G80 Ultra didn't approach this $1K mark. Given how many times Nvidia has had to backpedal and apologize about the Ultra's pricing, you would think they would learn from their mistakes. I guess not, I hope they are prepared to deal with the long-term ramifications, backlash, and loss of goodwill stemming from this pricing decision.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
7.1 billion transistors and 6G of ram.I for one am sick of you people constantly whining.
If we check the whine log from the ATI32 days you were doing it then, too.
It's all you people do. Every time, all the time.
chizow - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link
And all you do is post inane, barely intelligible nonsense in defense of Nvidia. If you check your "whine logs" you'll see I've done my fair share of defending Nvidia, but I can't and won't give them a pass for what they've done with Kepler. AMD started it for sure with the terribad price:performance of Tahiti, but Nvidia has taken it to a new level of greed.And for all the idiots who are going to reply "herr dueerr Nvidai need make money not a charity derrr", my advanced reply is that Nvidia has made money in all but 2-3 quarters since 2006 without selling a single $1K desktop GPU. In fact, they enjoyed record profits, margin and revenue on the back of a $250 GPU, the 8800GT in 2007-2008.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Nope, you are the crying whining baby who says the same thing in 100 different posts here, and has no clue what "the economy" of "the world" has been doing for the past several years.Whatever.
Please go cry about all the other computer part prices that are doing the same thing.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
I mean you idiots want the same price for more perf over a DECADE. Meanwhile, the rest of the worlds pricing has DOUBLED.Now, computer prices used to drop across the board, but they just aren't doing it anymore, and IDIOTS like yourself continue on your stupid frikkin rants, ignoring the world itself, not to mention the LACK of production in that world for the GPU's you whine about. It's really funny how stupid you are.