Battlefield 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.

Far Cry 3 Civilization V
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  • CeriseCogburn - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link

    Enlightenment comes slow to the angry activist conspiracist tinfoil hatter, but it appears you've made progress.

    Another REASON $999 is the correct price.

    Suck it up loser.
  • Sabresiberian - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - link

    You know, there are some reasonable arguments against this card, but you have to take it to an AMD fanboy level by calling it an overpriced GTX 680.
  • iSlayer - Saturday, March 30, 2013 - link

    Titan gets pretty close to 690/680 SLI performance while using less power, producing less heat, and freeing up space for 3 additional Titans. With Titan, I can make a machine up to 60% more powerful than was previously possible. Sure, it's going to cost twice as much as it would to get the same performance from other cards, but that's only theoretical as you literally cannot match a Titan config with a single computer.

    You seem to have entirely missed the point of this card.
  • klepp0906 - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link

    if you thought the titan was a troll, i'd hate to see what you call their latest attempt w/ the titan black, free of the artificial limitations put in place just so they can make another money grab. (all while the driver support on the older card still falls flat on its face in many cases ie: surround)
  • ehpexs - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link

    Nvidia has been so greedy with 600 series. 560s turned into 680s and now this. Nvidia is not getting my money for years.
  • HighTech4US - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link

    > Nvidia has been so greedy with 600 series. 560s turned into 680s and now this. Nvidia is not getting my money for years.

    So you instead gave your money to greedy AMD and their $549 HD7970 last January or did you wait for AMD to become less greedy when they had to reduce the price by $120 because of the greedy Nvidia releasing the GTX680.
  • chizow - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link

    Yes AMD started this all with their ridiculous 7970 prices, but Nvidia has taken it way beyond that. $1K is usury, plain and simple.
  • Hrel - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link

    Haha, never seen anyone use the word "usury" in real life before. You used it kinda wrong but your point came across. Nice!
  • chizow - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link

    It's contemporary usage has extended beyond the traditional references to loans/interest, if you replace "interest" with "premium" it makes perfect sense. But glad you understood and enjoyed the reference.
  • mlambert890 - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link

    It's a ridiculous usage honestly. The sense of entitlement people have is almost incomprehensible that there is moral outrage over an expensive video card.

    If you feel its a bad deal, don't buy it. If you feel that somehow NVidia has committed a sin against nature by releasing the 680 originally (which is somehow now being viewed as "broken" I guess.. amazing) and then releasing this card at $1000, because you feel that this card should have *been* the 680, then you are making assumptions without any evidence.

    Everyone seems to be basing their angst on the notion that NVidia *could* be selling this card right now at $500. How does *anyone* know this? It's faith based insanity. No one knows what their yields are on this thing yet all of the disgruntled are going out on some wild limb screaming because they feel this card could have come out last year for half price.

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