NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTSynthetics
As always we’ll also take a quick look at synthetic performance to get a better look at Titan’s underpinnings. These tests are mostly for comparing cards from within a manufacturer, as opposed to directly comparing AMD and NVIDIA cards. We’ll start with 3DMark Vantage’s Pixel Fill test.
Pixel fill is a mix of a ROP test and a test to see if you have enough bandwidth to feed those ROPs. At the same time the smallest increase in theoretical performance for Titan over GTX 680 was in ROP performance, where a 50% increase in ROPs was met with a minor clockspeed reduction for a final increase in ROP performance of 25%.
The end result is that with gains of 28%, Titan’s lead over GTX 680 is just a hair more than its increase in theoretical ROP performance. Consequently at first glance it looks like Titan has enough memory and cache bandwidth to feed its 48 ROPs, which given where we’re at today with GDDR5 is good news as GDDR5 has very nearly run out of room.
Moving on, we have our 3DMark Vantage texture fillrate test, which does for texels and texture mapping units what the previous test does for ROPs.
Oddly enough, despite the fact that Titan’s texture performance improvements over GTX 680 were only on the range of 46%, here Titan is measured as having 62% more texturing performance. This may be how Titan is interplaying with its improved bandwidth, or it may be a case where some of the ancillary changes NVIDIA made to the texture paths for compute are somehow also beneficial to proper texturing performance.
Finally we’ll take a quick look at tessellation performance with TessMark.
Unsurprisingly, Titan is well ahead of anything else NVIDIA produces. At 49% faster it’s just a bit over the 46% theoretical performance improvement we would expect from the increased number of Polymorph Engines the extra 6 SMXes bring. Interestingly, as fast as GTX 580’s tessellation performance was, these results would indicate that Titan offers more than a generational jump in tessellation performance, nearly tripling GTX 580’s tessellation performance. Though at this time it’s not at all clear just what such tessellation performance is good for, as we seem to be reaching increasingly ridiculous levels.
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chizow - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
I haven't use this rebuttal in a long time, I reserve it for only the most deserving, but you sir are retarded.Everything you've written above is anti-progress, you've set Moore's law and semiconductor progress back 30 years with your asinine rants. If idiots like you running the show, no one would own any electronic devices because we'd be paying $50,000 for toaster ovens.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - link
Yeah that's a great counter you idiot... as usual when reality barely glints a tiny bit through your lying tin foiled dunce cap, another sensationalistic pile of bunk is what you have.A great cover for a cornered doofus.
When you finally face your immense error, you'll get over it.
hammer256 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Not to sound like a broken record, but for us in scientific computing using CUDA, this is a godsend.The GTX 680 release was a big disappointment for compute, and I was worried that this is going to be the trend going forward with Nvidia: nerfed compute card for the consumers that focuses on graphics, and compute heavy professional cards for the HPC space.
I was worried that the days of cheap compute are gone. These days might still be numbered, but at least for this generation Titan is going to keep it going.
ronin22 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
+1PCTC2 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
For all of you complaining about the $999 price tag. It's like the GTX 690 (or even the 8800 Ultra, for those who remember it). It's a flagship luxury card for those who can afford it.But that's beside the real point. This is a K20 without the price premium (and some of the valuable Tesla features). But for researchers on a budget, using homegrown GPGPU compute code that doesn't validate to run only on Tesla cards, these are a godsend. I mean, some professional programs will benefit from having a Tesla over a GTX card, but these days, researchers are trying to reach into HPC space without the price premium of true HPC enterprise hardware. The GTX Titan is a good middle point. For the price of a Quadro K5000 and a single Tesla K20c card, they can purchase 4 GTX Titans and still have some money to spare. They don't need SLI. They just need the raw compute power these cards are capable of. So as entry GPU Compute workstation cards, these cards hit the mark for those wanting to enter GPU compute on a budget. As a graphics card for your gaming machine, average gamers need not apply.
ronin22 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
"average gamers need not apply"If only people had read this before posting all this hate.
Again, gamers, this card is not for you. Please get the cr*p out of here.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - link
You have to understand, the review sites themselves have pushed the blind fps mentality now for years, not to mention insanely declared statistical percentages ripened with over-interpretation on the now contorted and controlled crybaby whiners. It's what they do every time, they feel it gives them the status of consumer advisor, Nader protege, fight the man activist, and knowledgeable enthusiast.Unfortunately that comes down the ignorant demands we see here, twisted with as many lies and conspiracies as are needed, to increase the personal faux outrage.
Dnwvf - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
In absolute terms, this is the best non-Tesla compute card on the market.However, looking at flops/$, you'd be better off buying 2 7970Ghz Radeons, which would run around $60 less and give you more total Flops. Look at the compute scores - Titan is generally not 2x a single 7970. And in some of the compute scores, the 7970 wins.
2 7970ghz (not even in crossfire mode, you don't need that for OpenCL), will beat the crap out of Titan and cost less. They couldn't run AOPR on the AMD cards..but everybody knows from bitcoin that Amd cards rule over nvidia for password hashing ( just google bitcoin bit_align_int to see why).
There's an article on Toms Hardware where they put a bunch of nvidia and amd cards through a bunch of compute benchmarks, and when amd isn't winning, the gtx 580 generally beats the 680...most likely due to its 512 bit bus. Titan is still a 384 bit bus...can't really compare on price because Phi costs an arm and a leg like Tesla, but you have to acknowledge that Phi is probably gonna rock out with its 512 bit bus.
Gotta give Nvidia kudos for finally not crippling fp64, but at this price point, who cares? If you're looking to do compute and have a GPU budget of $2K, you could buy:
An older Tesla
2 Titans
-or-
Build a system with 2 7970Ghz and 2 Gtx 580.
And the last system would be the best...compute on the amd cards for certain algorithms, on the nvidia cards for the others, and pci bandwidth issues aside, running multiple complex algorithms simultaneously will rock because you can enqueue and execute 4 OpenCL kernels simultaneously. You'd have to shop around for a while to find some 580's though.
Gamers aren't gonna buy this card unless they're spending Daddy's money, and serious compute folk will realize quickly that if they buy a mobo that will fit 2 or 4 double-width cards, depending on Gpu budget, they can get more flops per dollar with a multiple-card setup (think of it as a micro-sized Gpu compute cluster). Don't believe me? Google Jeremi Gosni oclhashcat.
I'm not much for puns, but this card is gonna flop. (sorry)
DanNeely - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Has any eta on when the rest of the Kepler refresh is due leaked out yet?HisDivineOrder - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
It's way out of my price range, first and foremost.Second, I think the pricing is a mistake, but I know where they are coming from. They're using the same Intel school of thought on SB-E compared to IB. They price it out the wazoo and only the most luxury of the luxury gamers will buy it. It doesn't matter that the benchmarks show it's only mostly better than its competition down at the $400-500 range and not the all-out destruction you might think it capable of.
The cost will be so high it will be spoken of in whispers and with wary glances around, fearful that the Titan will appear and step on you. It'll be rare and rare things are seen as legendary just so long as they can make the case it's the fastest single-GPU out there.
And they can.
So in short, it's like those people buying hexacore CPU's from Intel. You pay out the nose, you get little real gain and a horrible performance per dollar, but it is more marketing than common sense.
If nVidia truly wanted to use this product to service all users, they would have priced it at $600-700 and moved a lot more. They don't want that. They're fine with the 670/680 being the high end for a majority of users. Those cards have to be cheap to make by now and with AMD's delays/stalls/whatever's, they can keep them the way they are or update them with a firmware update and perhaps a minor retooling of the fab design to give it GPU Boost 2.
They've already set the stage for that imho. If you read the way the article is written about GPU Boost 2 (both of them), you can see nVidia is setting up a stage where they introduce a slightly modified version of the 670 and 680 with "minor updates to the GPU design" and GPU Boost 2, giving them more headroom to improve consistency with the current designs.
Which again would be stealing from Intel's playbook of supplement SB-E with IB mainstream cores.
The price is obscene, but the only people who should actually care are the ones who worship at the altar of AA. Start lowering that and suddenly even a 7950 is way ahead of what you need.