NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTBattlefield 3
Our final action game of our benchmark suite is Battlefield 3, DICE’s 2011 multiplayer military shooter. Its ability to pose a significant challenge to GPUs has been dulled some by time and drivers, but it’s still a challenge if you want to hit the highest settings at the highest resolutions at the highest anti-aliasing levels. Furthermore while we can crack 60fps in single player mode, our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, so hitting high framerates here may not be high enough.
AMD and NVIDIA have gone back and forth in this game over the past year, and as of late NVIDIA has held a very slight edge with the GTX 680. That means Titan has ample opportunity to push well past the 7970GE, besting AMD’s single-GPU contender by 52% at 2560. Even the GTX 680 is left well behind, with Titan clearing it by 48%.
This is enough to get Titan to 74fps at 2560 with 4xMSAA, which is just fast enough to make BF3 playable at those settings with a single GPU. Otherwise by the time we drop to 1920, even the 120Hz gamers should be relatively satisfied.
Moving on, as always multi-GPU cards end up being faster, but not necessarily immensely so. 22% for the GTX 690 and just 12% for the 7990 are smaller leads than we’ve seen elsewhere.
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rcabor - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Why is the voltage higher at 996MHz to 992MHz? Is that a typo?rcabor - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
meant 966 MHz not 996 MHzRyan Smith - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Bingo. Fixed. Thank you.=)HollyDOL - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Hi,it seems a typo sneaked at voltages mentioned (page 2) at the three working frequencies tightly below 1GHz speed... should say 1.1625 (I guess) but says 1.625V for example. 1.625 also appears in text, not just the table.
just4U - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
I am interested in these luxury coolers for some of their lower end GPU's. I don't know what they cost but I'd pay a premium for it if it wasn't to far out there..BrokenCrayons - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Viewed outside fo consideration for the cost, it's quite impressive. Inexpensive (relatively) GPU compute seems like its focus which makes sense given the original design intentions. On the gaming side of the equation, the performance benefits don't stack well against the costs. A 680 or 7970 seems like a much more reasonable purchase unless the whole intention is for fairly pointless bragging rights to people that don't care, won't understand the significance, or are just random sorts you ramble to on the Internet about how much money you can afford to drop on a GPU which only returns the ability to waste time playing games at higher end display settings. So yeah, the performance is interesting, but the price puts it firmly into the "yeah whatever" territory of gaming.-BC
Hood6558 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
This is another piece of the puzzle I call my Ultimate Dream Machine, in which every component is the best or fastest available. It joins such parts as the i7-3970X, Asrock X79 Extreme11, Corsair 900D, Corsair Dominator Platinum 64 GB kits, and Corsair AX 1200i. I'll probably never have the money to build it, but that's okay, the dream is sometimes better than the reality. Anyway by the time I build it all the above parts will be obsolete, slow museum pieces, and the new stuff will be 10 times faster.silverblue - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
What's going on with the 7970's framerate in Crysis: Warhead's 1080p E Shaders/G Quality tests? It's massively behind the 7970GE.Also, the minimum framerate table for Crysis: Warhead appears to have been placed on top of the Far Cry 3 page in addition to the bottom of the Crysis: Warhead page.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
I'll have to look into that and get back to you. It's not a transcription error, so it may have been a configuration error on the benchmark.JlHADJOE - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
1/3 FP64 is awesome. This is a bargain if you need the compute.If you wanna play games on it... not so much. =P