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
Stop whining along with the rest of them, grow a set, get a job, and buy two of them.Might do you some good.
Alucard291 - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
Unlike you, I have a job :)chizow - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
Good point, I'd tend to agree with that assessment as anyone who actually works for their money would not be so eager to part with it so quickly in $1K denominations for what amounts to a glorified pinball machine.He's probably a kid who has never had to work a day in his life or a basement dweller who has no hope of ever buying one of these anyways.
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
And now with the pure troll, the lying idiot conspiracist nVidia hater takes on the pure personal attack for a big fat ZERO score.Congratulations, you and your pure troll can high five each other and both be wrong anyway, for another yer or two, or the rest of your whining crybaby posting PC herd idiot mentality lives.
Alucard291 - Friday, March 8, 2013 - link
No no kid. You're the "pure troll here"So yeah go get a job and buy two of them. For yourself. Stop being angry at us for not being able to afford it
~lol~
wiyosaya - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
While I understand your frustrations, IMHO, this is a card aimed at those wanting the compute performance of a Tesla at 1/3 the cost. As I see it, nVidia shot themselves in the foot for compute performance with the 680, and as such, I bet that 680 sales were less than expected primarily because of its crappy compute performance in comparison to say even a 580. This may have been their strategy, though, as they might have expected $3,500 Teslas to fly off the shelf.I am also willing to bet that Teslas did not fly off the shelf, and that in order to maintain good sales, they have basically dropped the price of the first GK110s to something that is reasonable with this card. Once can now buy 3.5 Titan's for the price of the entry level GK110 Tesla, and I highly expect nVidia to make a profit rather than the killing that they might have thought possible on the GK110 Teslas.
That said, I bet that nVidia gets a sht load of orders for this card from new HPC builders and serious CAD/CAE workstation suppliers. Many CAD/CAE software packages like SolidWorks and Maple support GPGPUs in their code making this card a bargain for their builds.
My apologies, to all the gamers here but us compute nerds are drooling over this card. I only wish I could afford one to put in my i7-3820 build from July. It is more than 2x what I paid for a 580 back then, and the 580 buy was for its compute performance.
atlr - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
wiyosaya, I am trying to come up to speed on comparing compute performance between Nvidia and AMD options. Is the Titan drool-worthy only for software that only uses CUDA and not OpenCL? This reminds me of the days of Glide versus OpenGL APIs.trajan2448 - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link
AMDs fps numbers are overstated. They figured out a trick to make runt frames, or frames which are not actually rendered to trigger the fps monitor as a real fully rendered frame. This is real problem for AMD much worse than the latency problem. Crossfire is a disaster which is why numerous reviewers including Tech Report have written that Crossfire produces higher fps but feels less smooth than Nvidia.Check this article out. http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA...
chizow - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
That's an awesome analysis by PCPer, thanks for linking that. Might end up being the biggest driver cheat scandal in history. Runt framesgate lol.CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
HUGE amd cheat.It's their standard operating procedure.
The fanboys will tape their mouths, gouge out their eyes and stick fingers in their ears and chant: "I'm not listening".