NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTCivilization V
Our final game, Civilization V, gives us an interesting look at things that other RTSes cannot match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry, driver command lists for reducing CPU overhead, and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
Maxing out at 2560, even with everything turned up none of our high-end cards have a problem here. Somewhat surprisingly we’re not completely CPU limited here, but even at 2560 everything north of the GTX 580 gets 60fps.
Nevertheless Titan completely clobbers the competition on our final game, delivering 60% better performance than both the GTX 680 and 7970GE. Even the 7990 can at best tie Titan here, giving us a case for when one GK110 is as good as two Tahiti GPUs. It’s not clear what exactly Civ V favors about Titan, but it’s clearly something that makes Titan different from GTX 680 and other GK104 cards.
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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.