NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTDiRT: Showdown
Racing to the front of our 2013 list will be our racing benchmark, DiRT: Showdown. DiRT: Showdown is based on the latest iteration of Codemasters’ EGO engine, which has continually evolved over the years to add more advanced rendering features. It was one of the first games to implement tessellation, and also one of the first games to implement a DirectCompute based forward-rendering compatible lighting system. At the same time as Codemasters is by far the most prevalent PC racing developers, it’s also a good proxy for some of the other racing games on the market like F1 and GRID.
DiRT: Showdown is something of a divisive game for benchmarking. The game’s advanced lighting system, while not developed by AMD, does implement a lot of the key concepts they popularized with their Leo forward lighting tech demo. As a result performance with that lighting system turned on has been known to greatly favor AMD cards. With that said, since we’re looking at high-end cards there’s really little reason not to be testing with it turned on since even a slow card can keep up. That said, this is why we also test DiRT with advanced lighting both on and off starting at 1920x1080 Ultra.
The end result is perhaps unsurprising in that NVIDIA already starts with a large deficit with the GTX 680 versus AMD’s Radeon cards. Titan closes the gap and is enough to surpass the 7970GE at every resolution except 5760, but just barely. This is the one game like this and as a result I don’t put a ton of stock into these results on a global level, but I thought it would make for an interesting look none the less.
This also settles some speculation of whether DiRT and its compute-heavy lighting system would benefit from the compute performance improvements Titan brings to the table. The answer to that is yes, but only by roughly as much as the increase in theoretical compute performance over GTX 680. We’re not seeing any kind of performance increase that could be attributed to improved compute efficiency here, which is why Titan can only just beat the 7970GE at 2560 here. However the jury is still out on whether this means that DiRT’s lighting algorithm doesn’t map well to Kepler period, or if it’s an implementation issue. We also saw some unexpected weak DirectCompute performance out of Titan with our SystemCompute benchmark, so this may be further evidence that DirectCompute isn’t currently taking full advantage of everything Titan offers.
In any case, at 2560 Titan is roughly 47% faster than the GTX 680 and all of 3% faster than the 7970GE. It’s enough to get Titan above the 60fps mark here, but at 5760 no single GPU, not even GK110, can get you 60fps. On the other hand, the equivalent AMD dual-GPU products, the 7970GECF and the 7990, have no such trouble. Dual-GPU cards will consistently win, but generally not like this.
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veppers - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Grow up man.CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Adults like myself face reality. Lying fanboys act like spoiled brats and cannot stand to hear or see the truth.You're a child.
Alucard291 - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
Yup and you sound just like the spoilt brat in question. This is not engadget mate. Go away.CeriseCogburn - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
So far you've posted 3 attacks against me, and added exactly NOTHING to any discussion here.It's clear you're the whining troll with nothing to say, so you are one that needs to go away, right ? Right.
chizow - Monday, February 25, 2013 - link
Oh the irony, you are crying about posting personal attacks and adding nothing to any discussion here? That's what every single one of your posts boils down to.Alucard291 - Friday, March 8, 2013 - link
The discussion? You spew random offensive insulting nonsense against anyone who dares to point out that slower + more expensive is worse than faster and cheaper (be it amd or nv).You then proceed to attack people (on a very personal level I might add) for whatever other reason and go on to say that AMD (did anyone except you even mention amd? - well I'm sure some did but mostly due to your constant stream of butthurt) is terrible.
Cool don't use them. Calm down, relax, take a breather go for a walk.
Or of course you can continue whiteknighting some random product that you are unlikely (given the odds) to ever buy for yourself. Who cares. Just get off the neophyte train when you do it. Ok?
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - link
You have no clue on any odds.Like I said, you people are 3rd worlder crybabies.
Between bragging hardcore upper end users frequent Anandtech, you whine and cry about 1/3rd the price of a decent PC.
You're all full of it, and all act like you're budget is personal malaria in sub saharan Africa, except of course when you're rig bragging.
This is the USA, except of course wherever you penniless paupers reside.
RussianSensation - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Yes, yes. Keep eating NV's marketing. 36-38% faster than a $430 HD7970GE for $1000???!!http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/grafikkarten/20...
Heck, you can buy a $500 Asus Matrix Platinum 7970 and those overclock to 1300mhz, which makes the Matrix 30% faster than the GTX680. Do the math and see where that ends up relative to the Titan.
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canu...
This is really a $699 card max.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Why buy a crashing piece of crap amd cannot even write drivers for ?Forget it.
AMD is almost gone too, so "future proof" is nowhere except in nVidia's pocket.
Now and in the future, nVidia wins period.
Idiots buy amd.
Hrel - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
The problem with that reasoning, that they're raising here, is that the 7970 is almost as fast and costs a lot less. The Titan is competing, based on performance, with the 7970. Based on that comparison it's a shitty deal.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
$430. So based on that I'd say the highest price you can justify for this card is $560. We'll round up to $600.
Nvidia shipping this, at this price, and just saying "it's a luxury product" is bullshit. It's not a luxury product, it's their version of a 7970GHE. But they want to try and get a ridiculous profit to support their PhysX and CUDA projects.
Nvidia just lost me as a customer. This is the last straw. This card should be pushing the pricing down on the rest of their lineup. They SHOULD be introducing it to compete with the 7970GHE. Even at my price range, compare the GTX660 to the 7870GHE, or better yet the sub $200 7850. They just aren't competitive anymore. I'll admit, I was a bit of a Nvidia fan boy. Loved their products. Was disappointed by older ATI cards and issues I had with them. (stability, screen fitting properly, audio issues) But ATI has become AMD and they've improved quality a lot and Nvidia is USING their customers loyalty; that's just wrong.
I'm done with Nvidia on the desktop. By the time I need a new laptop AMD will probably have the graphics switching all sorted; so I'm probably done with Nvidia on laptops too.