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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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".